ur books,) has grown rich, and
resolves to see the world with his wife and son, and has wisely
invited Miss Fuller to show it to him. Now, in the first place,
I wish you to see Margaret when you are in special good humor,
and have an hour of boundless leisure. And I entreat Jane
Carlyle to abet and exalt and secure this satisfaction to me. I
need not, and yet perhaps I need say, that M.F. is the safest of
all possible persons who ever took pen in hand. Prince
Metternich's closet not closer or half so honorable. In the next
place, I should be glad if you can easily manage to show her the
faces of Tennyson and of Browning. She has a sort of right to
them both, not only because she likes their poetry, but because
she has made their merits widely known among our young people.
And be it known to my friend Jane Carlyle, whom, if I cannot see,
I delight to name, that her visitor is an immense favorite in the
parlor, as well as in the library, in all good houses where she
is known. And so I commend her to you.

Yours affectionately,
R.W. Emerson

CXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 December, 1846

Dear Emerson,--This is the 18th of the month, and it is a
frightful length of time, I know not how long, since I wrote to
you,--sinner that I am! Truly we are in no case for paying debts
at present, being all sick more or less, from the hard cold
weather, and in a state of great temporary puddle but, as the
adage says, "one should own debt, and crave days";--therefore
accept a word from me, such as it may be.

I went, as usual, to the North Country in the Autumn; passed
some two extremely disconsolate months,--for all things distress
a wretched thin-skinned creature like me,--in that old region,
which is at once an Earth and a Hades to me, an unutterable
place, now that I have become mostly a _ghost_ there! I saw
Ireland too on my return, saw black potato-fields, a ragged noisy
population, that has long in a headlong baleful manner followed
the _Devil's_ leading, listened namely to blustering shallow-
violent Impostors and Children of Darkness, saying, "Yes, we know
_you,_ you are Children of Light!"--and so has fallen all out at
elbows in body and in soul; and now having lost its _potatoes_
is come as it were to a crisis; all its windy nonsense cracking
suddenly to pieces under its feet: a very pregnant crisis
indeed! A country cast suddenly into the melting-pot,--say into
the Medea's-C