--Clough is coming home, I
hope.--Write soon, if you be not enchanted!
Yours ever,
T. Carlyle
CLIIa. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 10 August, 1853
My Dear Carlyle,--Your kindest letter, whose date I dare not
count back to,--perhaps it was May,--I have just read again, to
be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness to me, not
without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may
be a-forging to strike me. My slowness to write is a distemper
that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only,
though the circumstance is not worth stating, because, if I
ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason
for writing to you. I believe the reason of this recusancy is
the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at
the same page. For I have some experiences, that my interest in
thoughts--and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and
thinking--outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and
offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity. But though rebuked
by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of
disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a
special hell provided for me in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet
confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in a
conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we
find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from
stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude,
stilted, and violent fashion.
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