CLXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 6 April, 1870

Dear Emerson,--The day before yesterday your welcome Letter came
to hand, with the welcome news in it; yesterday I put into my
poor Document here the few words still needed; locked everything
into its still repository (your Letter, President Eliot's,
Norton's, &c., &c.); and walked out into the sunshine, piously
thankful that a poor little whim, which had long lain fondly in
my heart, had realized itself with an emphasis I could never
hope, and was become (thanks to generous enthusiasm on New
England's part) a beautiful little fact, lying done there, so far
as I had to do with it. Truly your account of matters threw a
glow of _life_ into my thoughts which is very rare there now;
altogether a gratifying little Transaction to me,--and I must add
a surprising, for the enthusiasm of good-will is evidently great,
and the occasion is almost infinitesimally small! Well, well;
it is all finished off and completed,--(you can tell Mr. Eliot,
with many thanks from me, that I did introduce the proper style,
"President and Fellows," &c., and have forgotten nothing of what
he said, or of what he _did_);--and so we will say only, _Faustum
sit,_ as our last word on the subject;--and to me it will be, for
some days yet, under these vernal skies, something that is itself
connected with THE SPRING in a still higher sense; a little
white and red-lipped bit of _Daisy_ pure and poor, scattered into
TIME's Seedfield, and struggling above ground there, uttering
_its_ bit of prophecy withal, among the ox-hoofs and big jungles