Let the people speak in the Turkish dialect, in Heaven’s name! It is their own, and they have no other. A better class of persons, too, are to be found here and there,—a sober, discreet, logic-loving, moderately well-informed class: with these I can talk and enjoy myself; but only talk as from an upper window to people in the street; into the house (of my spirit) I cannot admit them; and the unwise wonderment they exhibit when I do but show them the lobby warns me to lose no time in again slamming-to the door. But what of society? Round our own hearth is society enough, with a blessing. I read books, or, like the Roman poet and so many British ones, ‘disport on paper’; and many a still evening, when I stand in our little flower-garden (it is fully larger than two bed-quilts) and smoke my pipe in peace, and look at the reflection of the distant city lamps, and hear the faint murmur of its tumult, I feel no little pleasure in the thought of ‘my own four walls’ and what they hold. On the whole, what I chiefly want is occupation; which, when ‘the times grow better’ or my own ‘genius’ gets more alert and thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to present itself. Idle I am not altogether, yet not occupied as I should be; for to dig in the mines of Plutus, and sell the gift of God (and such is every man’s small fraction of intellectual talent) for a piece of money, is a measure I am not inclined to; and for _invention_, for Art of any sort, I feel myself too helpless and undetermined. Some day,—oh that the day were here!—I shall surely speak out those things that are lying in me, and give me no sleep till they are spoken! Or else, if the Fates would be so kind as to show me—that I had nothing to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it after all; a hard result, yet not intolerable, were it once clear and certain. Literature, it seems, is to be my trade; but the present aspects of it among us seem to me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting. I love it not: in fact, I have almost quitted modern reading: lower down than the Restoration I rarely venture in English. Those men, those Hookers, Bacons, Brownes, were _men_; but, for our present ‘men of letters,’ our dandy wits, our utilitarian philosophers, our novel, play, and sonnet manufacturers, I shall only say, May the Lord pity us and them! But enough of this! For what am I that I should censure? Less than the least in Israel.” The mood here, though philosophic, pensive, and critical, is on the whole even cheerful, and accords undeniably with what we should expect from his own statement as to the remarkable change of spirit that had been effected in him during the late idyllic year at Hoddam Hill. It accords also with all that I have been able to learn independently of Carlyle in those now distant days of his early married life.