Ever Yours,
T.
Carlyle
CXX. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 30 April, 1847
My Dear Carlyle,—I have two good letters from you, and until now you have had no acknowledgment. Especially I ought to have told you how much pleasure your noble invitation in March gave me. This pleasing dream of going to England dances before me sometimes. It would be, I then fancy, that stimulation which my capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. At home, no man makes any proper demand on me, and the audience I address is a handful of men and women too widely scattered than that they can dictate to me that which they are justly entitled to say. Whether supercilious or respectful, they do not say anything that can be heard. Of course, I have only myself to please, and my work is slighted as soon as it has lost its first attraction. It is to be hoped, if one should cross the sea, that the terror of your English culture would scare the most desultory of Yankees into precision and fidelity; and perhaps I am not yet too old to be animated by what would have seemed to my youth a proud privilege. If you shall fright me into labor and concentration, I shall win my game; for I can well afford to pay any price to get my work well done. For the rest, I hesitate, of course, to rush rudely on persons that have been so long invisible angels to me. No reasonable man but must hold these bounds in awe:—I— much more,—who am of a solitary habit, from my childhood until now.—I hear nothing again from Mr. Ireland. So I will let the English Voyage hang as an afternoon rainbow in the East, and mind my apples and pears for the present.