When your letter of the 19th December reached me, with its legitimate strictness on some of Sims’s ballads2, I was finishing a “screed” of verses--In the Condemned Cell--the outpourings of a woman convicted of child-murder. I intended in these verses to draw attention to a glaring de::fect in the English com-law3, and send the production to Blackwood’s Magazine4, but your criticism has frightened me so far as these verses are con::cerned into inaction! You see what an influence you are! Some fractionlets of recent verse I shall send you some of these January days.

Since the holidays began I have been wonderfully busy, and now that, so far as my own work is concerned, I am getting the rope tight I intend to keep it so. M. Taine’s somewhat materialistic English Literature5 I am going through carefully and critically, with extensive readings in French and German generally. By the way, if you have your copy of Helen Faucit’s Shakes::peare’s Heroines6 at hand, you might let me have it for a little while. I cannot get the book here. I shall handle it reverently and, perhaps, return it to you in person. Is that any inducement to you to send it, I wonder!

The weather still continues mar::vellously wild. In the second morning of the year--the morning of great beauty, temperate and tranquil as the morning of a harvest day--I visited Van Courtland’s bower7 on the Northern side of the Bow. You remember the path out by the poor fellow in the steep bush-clad bank and the rustic seat he has erected among the poplar shoots half way up, where you and I sat and talked of many things one August evening after we returned from the ranch. On this occasion I sat there alone, read the first book of Keats’s Lamia8, and, when I laid down the precious volume, thought of much. All around the arbour of grass, flowers, and bush, was withered and dead, dry and brown as Sahara sands, but the sun shone fair on it all, and I remembered what it had been, and I knew what it would be again.--

Oh would that the heart, like a flower,

Its bloom could renew every year,

That no deed of the Past held its power

The Future no fear!

Ah! That Future. The view from where I sat was memorable. Among the alders below were a few Indian tepees9, the blue smoke curling up from their brown can::vas coverings. At my feet flowed the Bow, blue and storied as the Rhine10, flowing as it has flowed all these thousands of years since a path was cloven11 for it through the mountains, old as Silva’s brook12 itself! On the plateau beyond were the gaudily painted houses of Calgary to last but a little longer than the poor red man’s tepee; and behind them the brown hills, the bastions of the everlasting mountains beyond, their snowy peaks, calm as death, have as disembodied spirits, rising high into the azure of the morning sky, where, like a wraith, hung the waning moon of a dead year. I saw there amid the decay of leaf and grass, and saw it all until the morn sunshine drew up the white vapours of the morn::ing and veiled the mountains from me. “For what is your life? It is ever a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”13 Oh my comrade! how contemptible at times are our ambitions, our joys, our disappointments and very14 sorrows! I am cheered by good news from the old country and from there have had more than what I deserve of kindly greetings and New Year wishes. I trust before long to write to you definitely of some of my plans for the future. I am striving to be--to do--not to talk, and I fear to write to you at random. That beautiful letter from Fern Hill15, with a fragrance as of roses and lilies, has breathed sweet impulses on me, opening up vistas of pleasant shade, pure blossom, and goodly fruit. It would have been perfect had it told of your Aunt be::ing better. Why does she fear for you and Scotland?

I was requested in the be::ginning of last week to or::ganise and manage here a segment of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle16 --do you know of the organisation?--but I refused the honour on the ground of the uncertainty of my being here any length of time.

Ever Your Faithful Comrade

E. Charlton Black.

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12, January : 1891.

My dear Comrade,

Frank brought me your letter of the 6th--which you must have been writing when I was writing my last letter to you--early this morn::ing, as I was sitting by my desk at the window of my room, chin on hand, looking out and Eastward, watching the sun rising over the painted gables, and dreaming of you and the Future. Ay, dreaming, my comrade!--but do not be angry with me. Is not dreaming the wine of life, if not the elixir, sus::taining us in act and labour? Living is dreaming; “We are such stuff as dreams are made of”1. Great deeds are all self-promised in making dreams. In the grave only will we be done with them.

Two courses are open to me for the immediate future. Before I take the one or the other, I must tell of them to you, and you will write me, faith::fully and frankly, what you think of them. Would that I could but run down the board-walk to the “other house”, and find you before the corner fire there, and talk with you about them!--but you are two thousand miles away.

Which of the two shall it be?--(or is there a third that suggests itself to that practical head of yours?) to return to Edinburgh, and, instead of depending wholly on literature, to patiently lecture in the schools and colleges, with my eye on the University, attaching myself to the libraries and devoting all available time to research and original work in Literature; or, once more to plunge into the mael-strom of literary London, with its infinite possibilities for good and evil. Que voulez-vous?2

There is a fascination about the London alternative which the Edinburgh scheme with its days and nights of toil lacks, but, like other fascinations, it may be born of Evil rather than of Good. But, my comrade, write me fully and unreservedly of all this and aught3 else that occurs to you with regard to this, and I shall, with bowed head, listen to all you say and I promise you to ponder it well.

To the idyllic life at Liddelbank4 I shall return no more. That way lie lyric poetry and moonlight dreams of sweet phantasy, but, as you suggest in your splendid letter that I received this morning, prose of fact and earnest thoughts and life has to be written now, and what poetry comes will be rather of the epic or dramatic character, dashed more with tragedy than comedy! What time or money I have devoted to that fair Border how that I love so well, I shall cheerfully resign to my sister and her dear children, in the affectionate hope that all may yet be well with them there in spite of the last unfortunate years5. But I cannot but wonder if the Kindly Fates will allow me to take you there for a little while, and to Liddesdale, to its woods and glens, haunted of primroses + hyacinths, to its hedge-rows + hill-sides, loud with the voices of birds. What happy pleasure to stand with you in Greena6, sweetest of hills shone on by the sun!--and to show you from its rounded summit all the valley of the Liddell7, fabulous as Hydaspes8, swung like a hammock among the hills and garlanded with woods, from the heights of bonnie Tevintdale9 to the gleaming Solway10; to show you from that Pisgah-height11 all the Border-land from green Selkirk12 to dark Northumberland13 and all its storied hills and mountains to Criffell14 with its memories of Burns15, to Hel::vellyn, Skiddaw and Blencathra16, with their memories of Words::worth, the Delectable Mountains of my childhood, all tremulous with legend, story, + romance, the very house of Poesie! There for fifty long years lived my saintly Father; there that dark, December dawn eleven years ago he died, and it seemed as if the sun had gone out of the heavens--as if the light of my life had gone out; and there, beneath an aged ash-tree in the lonely churchyard far up a hill-side that is first touched of the rising sun, he sleeps well--

“his part in all the pomp

That fills the circuit of the summer hills

Is that his grave is green.”17

What you write of your brother’s criticism on “Lear’s Fool”18 and of co-working and studying with me fills me with strange thoughts and my eyes with strange tears. Surely it cannot be amiss to cherish the thought labouring together somewhere, somehow, sometime--acting and re-acting on each other in the truest and highest sense, each supplying what the other most needs, each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give. In that stern fight that we have now to go out to, sweet assistance of some kind will be needed lest alone we become too grim and self-contained. There is not much fear, I think, of our constituting ourselves into a mutual-admiration and mutual-adulation society! Alas, my comrade, may it not be too much the other way?--and in this connexion let us not for::get how our Valley19 got its mystic name. The earnestness of our feelings for each other’s well::being, the intensity of our emotions, should save us from that. Of mere admiration and adulation alas! We can get plenty anywhere if we wish it, if we lay ourselves open for it. And if any are satisfied with these things, verily let them have them for their reward. But what is all the applause of the world, the idiot gabble of the crowd of poor mortals, when once we have heard the sphere-music of the eternal verities pealing through our beings, and our souls have caught but a glimpse of the “light that never was on land or sea”20 except perhaps on that immortal sea

“which brought us hither;

Can in a moment travel thither--

And see the children sport

upon the shore

And hear the mighty waters

rolling evermore.”21

When I began this letter I fully intended to tell you of some of the social doings in Calgary--I am a pen hand at that sort of thing, but I should have done my best to interest you in some of these things--but I have got far enough away surely, to Liddesdale and Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality! But you shall have the letter with the gossip too some of these days.

I have quite got over my cold and my accident, and last night I delivered in the Presbyterian Church an oration in support of the Sabbath School22 and other organisations of the church to an immense audience that packed the building. From personal congratulations and news::paper notices I fancy I got on all right; but I shrink from speaking in a church, and how much rather I would at all times be silent than speak!

I regret that Chambers’s Journal23 procrastinates; perhaps a scolding will do the senders off the good they so much need.

With affectionate regards,

I remain,

Your Faithful Comrade,

Charlton.

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There is something profoundly meditative and nurturing to take in their thoughts and experiences, slowed by the handwritten scripts of Ebenezer and Agnes. The former was meticulous in his handwriting. He rarely, rarely made a mistake or changed his mind after putting ink to paper, and his script was tighter and more easily read (though not without a deep learning curve and plenty of tricky words to decipher). The latter’s handwriting at times looks like a different alphabet altogether; transcribing Agnes’s letters generally took 2-3 times longer than Ebenezer’s.

A few guiding notes for readers:

• Original formatting is retained whenever possible.
  Spelling, punctuation, and dialect reflect what is on the original page, which readers are invited to read—even before reading the transcript. Substack can override formatting, such as speciality indentations like Ebenezer and Agnes used. All underlined language in the original letters is italicized here because underlining is not an option on Substack. Ebenezer’s hyphenation, for which he used a dot (not uncommon at the time in Britain and Canada), is represented by an en dash.

• The double colon (::)
  This punctuation was one of Ebenezer’s signatures, a device he used to indicate a split word at the end of a line. The first colon follows the end of the first part of the word, and on the next line the second colon precedes the end of the word. His double colon appears frequently and has been transcribed to combine the colons , thereby making one word.

• Page Connectors
  At the bottom of every page, Ebenezer wrote the first word of the next page to help organize the pages. These repeated words are not indicated within the transcript, but they are in the photographic images of the letters.

• British Spelling
  The letters reflect the language habits of the time, particularly within the context of Ebenezer’s Scottish education and Agnes’s Canadian background.

• Transcript Gaps
  When a word or phrase is indecipherable due to smudging, damage, or handwriting ambiguity, you’ll see double question marks: ??. Readers are warmly invited to help decipher these mysteries; these posts will appear in the Notes section and are open to all.

• On Structure and Discovery
  Letters will be posted in roughly chronological groupings, with one partner's correspondence presented for a particular time period, then the other’s (when available). The ordering may not be precise — there are simply too many letters to read ahead, and deciphering them takes considerable time. This means that occasionally, a letter may surface later that logically belongs earlier in the sequence. When that happens, it will be added to the archive with care and context.

• Research Methods
  While all transcription work is done by hand, I occasionally use AI tools to assist with historical references, handwriting ambiguity, or contextual research.

This is a living archive. Transcriptions, images, and commentary may evolve over time as more is understood. Just as Ebenezer wrote, "We shall be the better and truer for every mis::understanding that we have come to understand."

Thank you for reading with curiosity and care.

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