It is impossible you

with a view towards studying him mainly! . . . can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so but John Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable fidelity of that man's mind, and how to him also duty was infinite,-Knox would have passed on wondering,—not reproaching." The spectacle thus suggested to our imagination of "sour John Knox" regarding such an iridescent æsthete, such a cultured pagan, as Goethe was, and so hopelessly irredeemable a worldling as the grin Scottish preacher would have accounted him, with any feeling ever so remotely akin to complacency, or in any attitude ever so distantly approaching to acquiescence, reminds us, irresistibly, by its strange incongruity, of the still more ludicrous predicament in which a great living poet conceives him to be placed-carried off forcibly to the playhouse at one of the chief Continental capitals of pleasure, and fastened down in a front-row box, whilst the ballet was being danced off by the performers in trousers and tunic!1

I

The subject of a visit to America is again mooted, but only to be dismissed. "As for America and lecturing, it is a thing I do sometimes turn over, but never yet with any seriousness. should rather fancy America mainly a new Commercial England, with a fuller pantry,-little more or little less. The same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit of endeavour, directed to the making of money, or money's worth; namely, food, finer and finer, and gigmanic renown higher and higher: nay, must not your gigmanity be a purse-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purseand-pedigree one? . . . So that you see when I set foot on American land, it will be on no Utopia." He asks for details about a series of lectures in the chief cities of the United States, expenses, net pecuniary result, &c., all of which Emerson supplies with business-like precision in a subsequent letter; but, as the reader knows, nothing was destined to come of it.

In a letter dated from Chelsea, May 13, 1835, Carlyle informs Emerson of a great mischance that had befallen. The story has been so often and so variously related, with such curious discrepancies in detail, that it is interesting to read it again in the words of the chief sufferer. For some time past Carlyle had been earnestly devoting himself to the accomplishment of his first great selfimposed task since his settlement in London,-"The French Revolution, a History." "By dint of continual endeavour," he writes, "for many weary weeks, I had got the first volume rather handsomely finished: from amid infinite contradictions I felt as if 1 Robert Browning : Bells and Pomegranates. NO. 1828.

VOL. CCLIV.

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my head were fairly above water, and I could go on writing my poor book, defying the devil and the world, with a certain degree of assurance, and even of joy. A friend borrowed this volume of manuscript, a kind friend but a careless one. One evening, about two months ago, he came in on us, 'distraction (literally) in his aspect'; the manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone! ... We had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it; which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. I began again at the beginning; to such a wretched paralysing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to do; at which I have worn myself these two months to the hue of saffron, to the humour of incipient desperation." The same letter contains a curious allusion to Wordsworth, couched in a strain of somewhat reserved and qualified praise. Carlyle had seen Wordsworth twice, it appears, during the past winter, "at considerable length, with almost no disappointment. He is a natural man; flows like a natural well yielding mere wholesomeness, though, as it would not but seem to me, in small quantity, and astonishingly diluted. Franker utterance of mere garrulities and even platitudes I never heard from any man ; at least, never, whom I could honour for uttering them. I am thankful for Wordsworth; as in great darkness and perpetual sky-rockets and coruscations, one were for the smallest clear-burning farthing candle." After this comparison of Wordsworth to a farthing candle, Carlyle's niece, who piously attended him in his declining years, need not feel too much abased at finding herself described as a "rushlight" (vol. ii. p. 316).

The growing reputation of Carlyle's writings in the United States, enabled Emerson, in 1836 and several succeeding years, to be very serviceable to his friend in procuring the publication of authorised reprints of Carlyle's writings in America, eventually with substantial pecuniary benefit to the author, which was highly acceptable in those early years of arduous struggle and noble poverty. "Sartor Resartus," though no bargain was yet made as to money in that case, led the way, being published at Boston (by James Munroe and Co.) early in 1836, with a preface by Emerson. "Sartor" had not yet appeared in England as a separate volume. Its publication had been confined to Fraser's Magazine, where it appeared piece-meal from time to time, a few copies being separately struck off from the Fraser types and circulated privately, as a stitched pamphlet, with a title-page bearing the words: "Sartor Resartus: In Three Books. Reprinted for Friends, from Fraser's Magazine, London, 1834." Of this rather shabby and very limited issue (not published in any sense) Carlyle

had sent several copies across the Atlantic to Emerson, the gradual distribution of which among a select circle had awakened a keen interest in, and eager demand for the book, which suggested and seemed to justify its republication in a more satisfactory form. In a letter dated September 17, 1836 Emerson reports that "the five hundred copies of the 'Sartor' are all sold ;" and at the end of March in the following year (1837), he writes: "The second edition of 'Sartor' is out, and sells well." No English edition saw the light for yet another year: in 1838 it was published in London for the first time in separate book form by Saunders and Otley.

In that letter of September 17, 1836, Emerson had a sad message to send to Carlyle-the news of the death of his brother Charles, which had happened in the preceding May. The memory of Charles Chauncy Emerson, we are assured by the editor of this Correspondence, "still survives fresh and beautiful in the hearts of the few" yet remaining, "who knew him in life. A few papers of his, published in The Dial, show to others what he was and what he might have become." Emerson himself, in breaking the news to Carlyle, describes this brother of his as "the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature much better than I." And more follows, with true fraternal affection and true human pathos in it, about the bright hopes of the future nipped in the bud.

In February 1837 Carlyle reports that his "French Revolution" is at last actually finished and passing through the press. "In not many weeks my hands will be washed of it! You can have little conception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in! I did not cry; nor I did not pray: but could have done both."

The perusal of "The Diamond Necklace," of the "Mirabeau" paper, and of a proof-sheet of "The French Revolution," inspired Emerson with an idea which finds very vivid and picturesque expression in his next letter (March 31, 1837). "I thought as I read this piece" (he refers here more immediately to "The Diamond Necklace"), "that your strange genius was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is this style: so vast, enormous, related to all the world, and so

endless in details. I think you see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your own."

In a letter from Carlyle, dated June 1, we hear of his first course of lectures, before "an audience of London quality people, on the subject of German Literature." On September 13, Emerson acknowledges receipt of a gift-copy of the newly published "French Revolution," in three volumes. Eleven hundred and sixty-six copies of "Sartor" have been sold; and it suggests itself, or is suggested to Emerson, that Carlyle's friends might have made a sum for the author by publishing it themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly he wondered why he had never had such a thought before, and went straight to Boston and made a bargain with a bookseller to print "The French Revolution." "There is yet, I believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so I gave him the first volume, and the printing is begun." In February 1838, Emerson announces another project for collecting a couple of volumes of Carlyle's "Miscellanies." "We shall print them on the same plan as the History, and hope so to turn a penny for our friend again. I surely should not do this thing without consulting you as to the selection, but that I had no choice. If I waited, the bookseller would have done it himself and carried off the profit." It must be recollected that the "Miscellanies," like "Sartor," had not yet been published in book-form in England.

The scheme for a collected edition of Carlyle's "Miscellanies" eventually swelled from two into four volumes. Many of the succeeding letters on both sides are occupied mainly with details respecting these transactions, which Emerson appears to have conducted and concluded in a thoroughly effective and business-like manner, the net pecuniary result to Carlyle (a matter of some importance to him at that period) being, during this and the six or seven succeeding years, by no means inconsiderable.

For all this energy displayed by his friend Carlyle is, of course very grateful. "You have been very brisk and helpful," he writes, "in this business of the 'Revolution' book, and I give you many thanks and commendations. It will be a very brave day when cash actually reaches me, no matter what the number of the coins, whether seven or seven hundred, out of Yankee-land; and strange enough, what is not unlikely, if it be the first cash I realise for that piece of work."

In a letter dated May 10, 1838 Emerson furnishes Carlyle with a very charming and suggestive picture of his own outlook and

environment. "I occupy two acres only of God's earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house I have, I believe, twenty-two thousand dollars, whose income, in ordinary years, is six per cent." I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter eight hundred dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends.... My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,-I call her Asia, and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night. . . . In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage my garden; and a week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year."

In Carlyle's letters of March 16 and June 15, 1838, we hear news of his second course of lectures "on the History of Literature," in the former as approaching, in the latter as "verily over now; and well over. The superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favour, increasing to the last. . . . I know not yet what the money result is; but I suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope of at worst doing the like again when the time comes. . . . Poverty and youth may do; poverty and age go badly together."

The burden of that noble poverty, so sturdily and philosophically borne, was at length to be lightened by his vigilant friend across the Atlantic. On July 30, 1838, Emerson was enabled to send Carlyle his first remittance from America-a bill of exchange for £50 sterling. Other remittances, of larger or less amount, followed from time to time (notably one of 100 sterling, on January 13, 1839, which Carlyle described as "the miraculous draught of paper"). It is needless to particularise each suffice it to repeat that the service thus untiringly rendered to Carlyle in providing him with these American subsidies in years when sufficient cash (even including the lecturing profits) was not forthcoming in this country, was a great and essential one. Accordingly when an opportunity afforded, in the summer of 1841, Carlyle was delighted to