"One thing grieves me: the tone of sadness, I might say of settled melancholy that runs through all your utterances of yourself. It is not right, it is wrong; and yet how shall I reprove you? If you knew me, you would triumphantly[A] for any spiritual endowment bestowed on a man, that it is accompanied, or one might say _preceded_ as the first origin of it, always by a delicacy of organisation which in a world like ours is sure to have itself manifoldly afflicted, tormented, darkened down into sorrow and disease. You feel yourself an exile, in the East; but in the West too it is exile; I know not where under the sun it is not exile. Here in the Fog Babylon, amid mud and smoke, in the infinite din of 'vociferous platitude,' and quack outbellowing quack, with truth and pity on all hands ground under the wheels, can one call it a home, or a world? It is a waste chaos, where we have to swim painfully for our life. The utmost a man can do is to swim there like a man, and hold his peace. For this seems to me a great truth, in any exile or chaos whatsoever, that sorrow was not given us for sorrow's sake, but always and infallibly as a lesson to us from which we are to learn somewhat: and which, the somewhat once _learned_, ceases to be sorrow. I do believe this; and study in general to 'consume my own smoke,' not indeed without very ugly out-puffs at times! Allan Cunningham is the best, he tells me that always as one grows older, one grows happier: a thing also which I really can believe. But as for you, my dear sir, you have other work to do in the East than grieve. Are there not beautiful things there, glorious things; wanting only an eye to note them, a hand to record them? If I had the command over you, I would say, read _Paul et Virginie_, then read the _Chaumière Indienne_; gird yourself together for a right effort, and go and do likewise or better! I mean what I say. The East has its own phases, there are things there which the West yet knows not of; and one heaven covers both. He that has an eye let him look! [Footnote A: There seems to be some omission or slip of the pen here.] "I hope you forgive me this style I have got into. It seems to me on reading your book as if we had been long acquainted in some measure; as if one might speak to you right from the heart. I hope we shall meet some day or other. I send you my constant respect and good wishes; and am and remain, "Yours very truly always, "T. CARLYLE." Carlyle first appeared as a lecturer in 1837. His first course was on 'German Literature,' at Willis's Rooms; a series of six lectures, of which the first was thus noticed in the _Spectator_ of Saturday, May 6, 1837.[A] [Footnote A: Facsimiled in "The Autographic Mirror," July, 1865.] "_Mr. Thomas Carlyle's Lectures_.