and shoot at
Craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered
us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even
tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again.
Money easilier won never sat in my pocket; money for delivering
us from a great nuisance, for now I will tell every gunner
applicant, 'I cannot, sir; it is let.' Our third happiness was
the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson,
from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from
his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had
an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course we could do no other
than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most
lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed
till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart's
content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane says
it is the first journey since Noah's Deluge undertaken to
Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a
cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful."

On the next Sunday, a week after his visit, Emerson wrote the
following account of it to his friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland.

"I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became
acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of
hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us
most. The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely;
that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the
meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle
does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to
be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world.
I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage
in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature
(say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called
'Characteristics,' pointed. He replied that he was not competent
to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see. My own
feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got
greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess
from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives
and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own
place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for eminent
men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the revers