"All summer last my one solacement in the form of work was writing and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of worship,--the only devout time I had had for a great while past. These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the way before I myself die; but such continues still mainly my employment, to me if to no other useful. To reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. To set about writing my own life would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common, impious, vulgar of this earth--what has it to do with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of eternity swallow me; for my share of it, that verily is the handsomest or one handsome way of settling my poor account with the _canaille_ of mankind, extant and to come." How would his sad old heart have been torn could he have foreseen that in the weakness of senility he would expose to the 'impious vulgar' all the most sacred secrets of his home life! Oh, the pity of it! As a slight offset to the sad revelations thus made, let us accept this little note in Emerson's diary during one of his visits to Chelsea:-- "C. and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are very engaging, and in her bookcase all his books are inscribed to her as they came, year by year, each with some significant lines." Emerson's regard for Mrs. Carlyle was very great, and there is not one of the many letters but sends a kindly and a warm greeting to her over the sea. For the rest, this correspondence exhibits Emerson in the light of a true and very useful friend to Carlyle,--taking infinite trouble in the early days to introduce Carlyle's books in America, and to secure to the author in his poverty some return for their publication here. In this he was successful, and sent with great delight little sums of money to his friend. The books met with a quicker recognition in America than in England; and after Emerson had said something to Carlyle of a new edition of "Sartor Resartus," Carlyle writes:-- "As for Fraser, however, the idea of a new edition is frightful to him, or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired for a 'Sartor.' In his whole wonderful world of Tory pamphleteers, Conservative younger brothers, Regent-street lawyers, Crockford gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons (whom water and much soap will not make clean), not a soul has expressed the smallest wish that way. He shrieks at the idea."