Dear Carlyle,—­Your friend, young Stanley, brought me your letter now too many days ago.  It contained heavy news of your household,—­yet such as in these our autumnal days we must await with what firmness we can.  I hear with pain that your Wife, whom I have only seen beaming goodness and intelligence, has suffered and suffers so severely.  I recall my first visit to your house, when I pronounced you wise and fortunate in relations wherein best men are often neither wise nor fortunate.  I had already heard rumors of her serious illness.  Send me word, I pray you, that there is better health and hope.  For the rest, the Colonna motto would fit your letter, “Though sad, I am strong.”

I had received in July, forwarded by Stanley, on his flight through Boston, the fourth Volume of Friedrich, and it was my best reading in the summer, and for weeks my only reading:  One fact was paramount in all the good I drew from it, that whomsoever many years had used and worn, they had not yet broken any fibre of your force:—­a pure joy to me, who abhor the inroads which time makes on me and on my friends.  To live too long is the capital misfortune, and I sometimes think, if we shall not parry it by better art of living, we shall learn to include in our morals some bolder control of the facts.  I read once, that Jacobi declared that he had some thoughts which—­if he should entertain them—­would put him to death:  and perhaps we have weapons in our intellectual armory that are to save us from disgrace and impertinent relation to the world we live in.  But this book will excuse you from any unseemly haste to make up your accounts, nay, holds you to fulfil your career with all amplitude and calmness.  I found joy and pride in it, and discerned a golden chain of continuity not often seen in the works of men, apprising me that one good head and great heart remained in England,—­immovable, superior to his own eccentricities and perversities, nay, wearing these, I can well believe, as a jaunty coat or red cockade to defy or mislead idlers, for the better securing his own peace, and the very ends which the idlers fancy he resists.  England’s lease of power is good during his days.

I have in these last years lamented that you had not made the visit to America, which in earlier years you projected or favored.  It would have made it impossible that your name should be cited for one moment on the side of the enemies of mankind.  Ten days’ residence in this country would have made you the organ of the sanity of England and of Europe to us and to them, and have shown you the necessities and aspirations which struggle up in our Free States, which, as yet, have no organ to others, and are ill and unsteadily articulated here.  In our today’s division of Republican and Democrat, it is certain that the American nationality lies in the Republican party (mixed and multiform though that party be); and I hold it not less certain, that, viewing all