Halifax | 6 Augst 1850
My dear Tyndall,
Thank you for your full and faithful account of your successes at Edinburgh1 I read them with as much interest as if they had been my own and in imagination slapped you on the back and cried ‘Bravo, my boy’. The only thing I found fault with was your returning so soon It would have been useful for you to have seen more of those men and unless you returned to Manchester to earn some bread I don’t know why it might not have been as easy for you to have bought it at Edinburgh as at Manchester You’re a queer, independent, and perhaps also a partly insane man, and although I want to be cross with you I am forced to admire partially some of y<our> independencies & insanities which makes it all the more uneasy to me. In one of your letters from Germany2 which I have read I should think a score times and which I cherish most you mentioned an ideal Friendship for us both to aim at, and attempt to realize: it was a ideal for me that and many times its soft soothing light has brightened these dark nooks and crannies – after our meeting I rejoiced that it was progressing to a reality, but when I left you to walk home from Pye Nest Lodge3 last Monday week I was sad, sad because partly you had left a blank behind you and I had nothing else to do but think of it, sad also because I thought proper to notice that this my beautiful ideal of Friendship was far from a reality yet and I cursed (foolish fellow) the world & its prudencies because they were a dead weight that held our performance fast Earth-bound and would not let it join its high soaring mate Fantasy. Fantasy said ‘ye two shall be as one, there shall be no mine and thine, but the cup shall pass freely between you’, & the mocking World laughed ‘Ha! Ha! what a pair of fools – look how one bucks the other the one a knave the other a fool They throw dust about their eyes, call it Love & fancy themselves half-Gods’ So that poor performance stood irresolute, confused & helpless – I was just opposite Bernard Hartley’s4 then and my pace had slackened to about half that of a snail I felt something wet on my cheek I believe & then as if the Devil had kicked me up I sprang & walked away briskly crying ‘Fool, will all this come for whining after, you have as much as you can bear, and are rewarded according to your worth; go along stupid Carter wants thee’ And I did go and forgot you; now and then over my desk, I thought I saw you trudging on & up Blackstonedge,5 but I lost you among my Building Lots at 50 to an inch,6 at night I tried to lose sight of you in the German Dictionary, but I did not succeed as well & at Evening I went to bed rather restless & thought as I set my alarum how it would growl out at 8 oclock and make me go to my Building lots, I fell asleep however and in the Morning when it sang out it connected itself with some confused dream or other, and I thought it didn’t growl as I expected, but called me up more cheerfully & bade me jump up & spoke something about better days if I did, and how all these difficulties would settle themselves this way and no other. We are fearfully & wonderfully made7 Tyndall aren’t we? Who dare say that Alarum did not speak to me? It is not a bit more wonderful than that I can speak. John8 is in the neighbourhood trotting about, we are as cheerful & friendly as ever – He read your letter handed it over to me, laughed & like Tom Perkinton9 said you were mad, at which I laughed too and said I thought you must be, and I do veritably think so yet, but then I also think that it is an enviable sort of madness and he’s a fool who once knowing it would wish to be sane – There are no letters here for you – Jimmy is in Glasgow, Little John is leaving Leeds it appears, he said he wrote to you at Edinburgh. If you can send me that Carlyle’s pamphlet10 of mine they are done now I will get them bound – send me Zig-zag11 also by post, I want it particularly, don’t neglect. – Let me know what you are doing with yourself repeatedly, and where to write to you & don’t forget the Commentary on ‘The Sphinx’12 | T.A. Hirst
Mr Ginty – | Engineer’s Office | Lancasre & Yorksre R:way | Manchester
For J. Tyndall, to | be forwarded (if | absent) to him.13
RI MS JT/1/H/150
your full … Edinburgh: letter 0418. Note that Hirst omitted punctuation at the edge of his paper and, in this position, as in many others, there is therefore no full stop.
one of your letters from Germany: possibly letter 0390, where Tyndall wrote ‘Let us endeavour to be friends Tom in as high a sense as any pair of fellows as ever lived’.
Pye Nest Lodge: the point to which Hirst walked with Tyndall (Hirst, ‘Journals’, 29 July 1850).
Bernard Hartley’s: possible reference to a resident of Allengate near Halifax.
Blackstonedge: misspelling of ‘Blackstone Edge,’ the route which Tyndall walked to Manchester
Building Lots at 50 to an inch: referring to the scale of the maps produced by Hirst’s surveying work.
fearfully … made: quotation from Psalms 139:14.
John: Hutchinson.
Perkinton: probably the same ‘Perkinton’ who surveyed with Tyndall in Halifax; see letter 0340, n. 8, and, for example, Tyndall’s journal entry for 29 June 1846 (JT/2/13a/131).
Carlyle’s pamphlet: one of Carlyle’s ‘Latter Day Pamphlets’. It is unclear to which pamphlet Hirst refers.
Zig-Zag: letter 0412 explains this request.
Commentary on ‘The Sphinx’: see letter 0426.
Mr Ginty … to him: address from envelope; and forwarding note in bottom left corner.
Please cite as “Tyndall0421,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 18 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0421