Chelsea, 7 May, 1852

Dear Emerson,-I was delighted at the sight of your hand again.  My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them I may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow,-as if I could have helped growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities!  I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable a ether;-and it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do.  And on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of Correspondence with me again; I believe you will find that also to be a commanded duty by and by!  To me at any rate, I can say, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years:  deep as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents; in the whole world I hardly get, to my spoken human word, any other word of response which is authentically human. God help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dog-kennel of a world!  And it is no joy to me to see it about to have its throat cut for its immeasurable devilries; that is not a pleasant process to be concerned in either more or less,- considering above all how many centuries, base and dismal all of them, it is like to take!  Nevertheless Marchons,-and swift too, if we have any speed, for the sun is sinking....  Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the Heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sibyl.  Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul.  Her “mountain me” indeed:- but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, a toute épreuve.-Your Copy of the Book came to me at last (to my joy):  I had already read it; there was considerable notice taken of it here; and one half-volume of it (and I grieve to say only one, written by a man called Emerson) was completely approved by me and innumerable judges.  The rest of the Book is not without considerable geniality and merits; but one wanted a clear concise Narrative beyond all other merits; and if you ask here (except in that half-volume) about any fact, you are answered (so to speak) not in words, but by a symbolic tune on the bagpipe, symbolic burst of wind-music from the brass band;-which is not the plan at all!-What can have become of Mazzini’s Letter, which he certainly did write and despatched to you, is not easily conceivable.  Still less in the case of Browning:  for Browning and his Wife did also write; I myself in the end of last July, having heard him talk kindly and well of poor Margaret and her Husband, took the liberty on your behalf of asking him to put something down on paper; and he informed me, then and repeatedly since, he had already done it,-at the request of Mrs. Story, I think.  His address at present is, “N Avenue des Champs Elysees, a Paris,” if your American travelers still thought of inquiring.-Adieu, dear Emerson, till next week.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle