17, May: 1891.

My dear Comrade

It is exactly a year ago to-day by the day of the month since I came to this house. The motto for the day from the Shakespeare calendar is an ex::cellent one from 2 Henry vi: “...O Lord that lends one life, Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!” How little one knows what the days and weeks are to bring! How the whole horizon of life changes, ay--its very sky, fresh stars ap::pearing in the night! How dif::ferent were my relations to this strange world of life and action a year ago from what they are to-day! Let us be thankful but silent. Your letter of the 8th has come with its sweet enclosure of pansies. But, my comrade, why are you un::happy, for I read between the lines that you are troubled about something? You are tired--is not that so? Tired, tired; and are longing for peace--for rest. Here are some lines that brought balm to my spirit the other day when I read them. Simple they are, with no mighty “somethingness”, but they breathed Peace to my soul when it was chafed by one of those petty worries of which life is so full:

I cannot wish that I could put away

The web I’m weaving, for a little while;

The shuttle is so heavy, the threads stray

Broken and crushed, and the tangles spiral.

The beauteous design; I am so tired

It irks me even to recollect the lay

I dreamed, when in my childhood I aspired

With sacred thirst to making it some day

In rapturous idyllic verse, so sweet

And strong that all the multitude would pause

And, marvelling at its beauty, gladly greet

The singer with a guerdon of applause.

Even if the coveted applause were mine,

My need and earned by burning midnight oil,

Lavish libations, streams of generous wine

Poured at my feet, rewarding thus my toil;

If loving hands bowed up my brow with hays

And wreaths of laurel, if around my name

A lustrous glory gleamed, if shouts of praise

And trumpet voices heralded my fame,--

I think I would not care to listen now;

I am so weary and it’s growing late;

The crown would be too heavy for my brow,

I’ve waited patiently beside the gate

So long, so long. Oh now that it might yield

And, swinging back upon its hinges, grant

My feet the passport to the blooming field

Where stray the streams for which my longings pant!

The cool, ombrogenous, vistas, green and sweet,

Dusky and dim with hushful silences,

Entice the tired pilgrim’s tired feet

To tarry in their restful silences:

And lay aside the dull, dun garb of care,

And don the soft white drapery of rest;

To loose the sandals and unbind the hair,

And quite the race and cease the feverish guest.

Of flitting fantasies, of glory dream;

No luxury, no gift that fate bestows

From all the blessings in her keeping, seems

As blissful as the rapture of repose1.

Dante, when asked at Santa Croce2 what he sought, said only: “Peace”. How one understands that answer now, though once it was so unin::telligible! It is not in seeking, it is not in endless striving, that peace is--that is certain. Is it anywhere but in self-renunciation? These verses that I have written out above, poor as they are in execution and trifling in quantity, have moved me more than ever I have been by the Sturm und Drang3 of Ibsen4. You ask me if I know Ibsen’s work. I know it to a certain ex::tent. Ghosts I studied somewhat carefully, but with little profit. It is an uncomfortable, if not an unclean, piece of work, against the public production of which men may reason::ably protest. I do not say that the play is prurient; it is rather Puritanically stern. But it is dull; it is undramatic; its subject is re::volting; here and there it touches on subjects which are unmentionable in public. It is not an immoral play; it is fiercely moral. But it seems to me that he is essentially provincial, and his scientific knowledge is entirely out of date. Have you seen his latest work--Hedda Gabler? It cannot but be a trial to many of his admirers. The Ibsen cult is, however, so well established that this last product of the Norse poet’s genius will find devotees and interpreters, and it must be admitted that it needs both. Archer and Gosse are the two apostles of the new cult, and they have fallen terribly fond of each other regarding the trans::lations of this latest of Ibsen’s creations. You will notice how Punch5 is ridiculing this last literary craze of Ibsenism, and I think rightly. After all the public is an ass, and requires at times to be driven out of awkward corners with a well applied cudgel!

When I saw the thumb-nail sketch of you in the Toronto Saturday Night that you so kindly forwarded to me, I could not but think of the story that W.H. Courtney told at the support given in his honour when he resigned his tutorships at Oxford on his appointment to be Editor of Murray’s Magazine. I think you heard me tell the story--one of my “yarns” as you used to call them! He dreamed that he was dead, and, on Peter refusing to let him into heaven because of his having done nothing worthy, he said, “But surely you will admit me seeing that I have suffered so much in that wretched world.” “What have you suffered?” asked Peter. “Why,” said Courtney, “there was a portrait of me in last week’s Pall Mall Budget.” “Step in”, said Peter, throwing wide the door, “and take a front seat among the martyrs.” I think you deserve a front seat among the martyrs. But the Hypatia6 hit was distinctly good and worthy.

You ask for news of the Literature and Philosophy Chairs at Winnipeg and Vancouver, and it is right that you should know all I know. Here is how the matter stands.--At Winnipeg the authorities have de::termined to readjust the whole work::ing of the University of Manitoba and found one or two new chairs in the Arts department. Chief Justice Taylor, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Principal King, with both of whom I stayed for a little while when passing through Winnipeg, have approached me with regard to allowing my name to be proposed for one or other of these appointments. I have consented on condition that, if any other appropriate position come my way before their scheme is carried into effect, I may not be trammelled in my decision regarding it by anything I have said to them. With respect to the pro::posed University of Vancouver I am in the same position. Meanwhile I am getting together testimonials and credentials that I may be armed for the fight, if fight there is to be. Would that I could tell thee something more definite, my lassie, but patience and courage! Let us not yield ourselves to despair or downheartedness.

Here I have got a new pupil--an Englishman, about 30 years of age, of some gifts of head and heart, owner of the Buckland ranch on the Elbow river, who has taken it into his head to read Greek and Latin literature, and was recommended by Bishop Pinkham to come to be for help. He comes to me here on Wed::nesday and Saturday afternoons and I do for him what I can:

“I mak his pickle meat

And I think I mak it well.”7

How strange it will be one day to look back upon these humble duties and how from day to day I fulfill as conscientiously as possible! They are doing this much for myself these duties--they are making me more patient and more accurate than I was used to be. These months of misery and ignominy may after all be a blessing in disguise, keeping me clear of many temptations to degrade myself, training me for the work that I have to do. All things make for good. For both of us here and now this may be best. I am glad that you like Anderson’s portrait. Few more genuine men walk this earth to-day than Anderson8--a wholesome, hearty, genial restful brother, with open heart and soul, speaking forth with earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual con::dition of his own being. As face answers to face, so does the heart of man to man.

A strange and serious calamity has overtaken me, which I made up my mind once not to mention to you, so cruel does it seem and inexplicable. The best of my writing, of the last five years have perished in the conflagration that destroyed the mail-car at Sudbury9 last week! When circumstances determined me to remain in this land a little longer, I sent to the Home-land10 for the MMS. of all those writings--verse and verse--of the last five years of Liddelbank, which I had deemed worth preserving and which, when I set out upon this pilgrim quest that brought me here, I left behind me for safe keeping. These, there is little doubt, were in the mail-car that plunged into the burning trestle and perished along with so much else. What does this mean? That I am to be tried to the uttermost--made perfect by suffering? I can only bow my head and, adopting Carlyle’s noble figure, say what I feel: so if the unseen schoolmaster had torn my copy-book when I showed it, and said, No, boy! then must write it better. So be it. Patience, then, and calm heroism. There still remain to me heart, head and hands, and paper, pens and ink have not taken leave of this planet! I shall be courageous for thee, my trusty and trusting comrade; then art worthy of it all. Let me not refer to this strange, sad busi::ness again. To my labours, then, and until the long night!

I have had a long solitary twi::light walk by the banks of the Bow. The river is in foaming flood “from bank to brae”, tawny as old Tiber, the high temperature of the last two days melting the mountain snows very rapidly. I have been standing a long while on the Eau Claire bridge, watching the huge logs of timber that, having escaped from some of the lumberers’ booms in the mountain forests, were being swept down swiftly to be cast up away down on the prairies, a blessed treasure-trove to some poor settler on the treeless plains. Now and again one of the unwieldy masses collided with the piles of bridge, and how the timbers would creak and vibrate!

Spring comes slowly up this way, but it is coming, and I am making a heroic attempt to make the most of it. We now have five varieties of wild flowers on the hills, and last night--for the second time since I came here--I heard a bird singing!

Your letter of the 14th and the pansied11 post-script of the 15th have come. By no means abandon as impracticable the trip to Scotland. But of all this and other issues raised by your letters I shall write you in the end of the week. How strange you should write so about Ibsen after what I have written about! You are right; there is no doubt of it. Not otherwise would I think of Ibsen than I do, than you do, if, in addition to Archer, Gosse and all the Ibsenites, the Sun on my right hand and the moon on my left were to pro::claim him Prophet, Reformer and Great Teacher of the future! The world is as mad every whit as it was of old, as ready to listen to every quack and charlatan who many happen to come round, all the more so if his tongue, or his panacea12, profess to deal with the indecencies and obscenities! When will a Savonarola13 arise to preach to us a Gospel of Reverence--Reverence for what is here and bright in youth; for what is true and tried in age; for all that is gracious among the living, great among the dead,--and marvellous in the Powers that cannot die!

It is good of you to say that my letters please you and to ask me to write to you often. Sometimes I feel as though I should like to write to you some word of my doing, thinkings, doubts and hopes every day. It is hard that we are so very far away from each other. How I wish that I could be near you to assist you with your preparations for your Autumn lectures! Ah for the someday--the someday, when, joining weakness to strength and giving strength to weak::ness, we learn through each other what it is to live.

Now do not abandon the trip to Edinburgh and Liddesdale, nor let your mother do so. Would that I could accompany you!

Your Sincere

Charlton.

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FOOTNOTES and EXPLANATIONS

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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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FOOTNOTES and EXPLANATIONS

23

A popular Victorian-era periodical published in Edinburgh by W. & R. Chambers, founded in 1832. It is likely that he or another writer submitted a piece for publication.

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 Eng…

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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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