Tyndall and Emerson

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THE two letters which follow were written to an American lady who chanced to meet Mr. Tyndall in Switzerland, where she was traveling with her young son : —

ROYAL INSTITUTION, ALBEMARLE STREET,

2d June, 1870.

MY DEAR MADAM, — I have by no means forgotten our meeting at the Riffel, nor our reciting the poetry of your eminent countryman, coming down the slope from the glacier to the hotel. I think we sounded Monadnoc.

I quote from memory, for long ago I lodged these lines and many others of Emerson’s in the book and volume of my brain.

I always thought those lines on Rhodora exquisite. But what the rhodora was “ I never knew.” Some time ago I was staying with a friend in the country, and while under shelter of a pine wood a group of us talked of the rhodora, but none of us knew anything about it. I had quoted some of the lines regarding it in a little book of mine about the Alps, written ten years ago : hence the conversation.

Many thanks to you for the flower ; no other flower could be more acceptable to me.

Some time ago Mr. Emerson gave me a pleasure of which he had necessarily no knowledge, I go down from time to time to Chelsea, to see that grand old man Thomas Carlyle. When I was there last, two books of Emerson were on the table, addressed, “ With unchangeable affection to Thomas Carlyle.” It did my heart good to see this loyalty.

Poor Mrs. Carlyle handed him over to my safe-keeping when he went to Edinburgh to be installed as rector of the University. She died while he was in Scotland. I afterwards went with him to Mentone. A few weeks ago I was with him in the country. It was a wild day, and we got into a clearing in the middle of a wood, where we sat in calm while the storm rolled around us. I plucked a cushion of ferns for the old man, placed it on the stump of a tree, helped him to light his pipe, and there we talked of death, and the privilege of being released from the fear of it.

I was so much pleased with Emerson’s books and their superscription that I carried them away with me ; they are here beside me.

I think my own single example would demonstrate the futility of all attempts to sever intellectual progress from moral influences, as Buckle tried to do some years ago. For even my science owes a great debt to Emerson, Fichte, and Carlyle, — three men who care little for science. But there were stirred the forces that were latent within me, and that these forces took the scientific direction was a mere accident.

I rarely write so long a letter. Good-bye.

Yours most truly,

JOHN TYNDALL.

Give Mr. Emerson my thanks. I might with truth offer more.

CONCORD, June 27, 1870.

DEAR MADAM, —I have been much interested by Professor Tyndall’s letter, which you have so kindly allowed me to read. The good will he expresses towards myself is highly gratifying to me, as I know well his own eminent worth. I could heartily wish that, since his scientific researches make him so much a traveler, they may, one of these days, bring him to America, where he has already, I doubt not, a larger public of readers than in England. He will, no’ doubt, like also to give new lessons to that young scholar of his at Riffel formerly, who, I am glad to hear, has come to value his letter. Mr. Tyndall’s notices of Carlyle are especially interesting to me, — every word.

I send you warm thanks for your kindness in sending me the letter, which I now reinclose.

With great regard, yours,

R. W. EMERSON.

It will be remembered that Tyndall did visit America two years afterward.