you some report of the same.  She has always lived with good people, and in her position is a centre of what is called good society, wherein her large heart makes a certain glory and refinement.  She is one of nature’s ladies, and when I hear her tell I know not what stories of her friends, or her children, or her pensioners, I find a pathetic eloquence which I know not where to match.  But I suppose you shall never hear it.  Every American is a little displaced in London, and, no doubt, her company has grown to her.  Her husband is a banker connected in business with your —–­, and is a man of elegant genius and tastes, and his house is a resort for fine people.  Thorwaldsen distinguished Mrs. —–­ in Rome, formerly, by his attentions.  Powers the sculptor made an admirable bust of her; Clough and Thackeray will tell you of her.  Jenny Lind, like the rest, was captivated by her, and was married at her house.  Is not Henry James in London? he knows her well.  If Tennyson comes to London, whilst she is there, he should see her for his “Lays of Good Women.”  Now please to read these things to the wise and kind ears of Jane Carlyle, and ask her if I have done wrong in giving my friend a letter to her?  I could not ask more than that each of those ladies might appear to the other what each has appeared to me.

I saw Thackeray, in the winter, and he said he would come and see me here, in April or May; but he is still, I believe, in the South and West.  Do not believe me for my reticency less hungry for letters.  I grieve at the want and loss, and am about writing again, that I may hear from you.

Ever affectionately yours,
                    R.W.  Emerson

CLIX.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 20 July, 1856

Dear Emerson;—­Welcome was your Letter to me, after the long interval; as welcome as any human Letter could now well be.  These many months and years I have been sunk in what disastrous vortexes of foreign wreck you know, till I am fallen sick and almost broken-hearted, and my life (if it were not this one interest, of doing a problem which I see to be impossible, and of smallish value if found doable!) is burdensome and without meaning to me.  It is so rarely I hear the voice of a magnanimous Brother Man addressing any word to me:  ninety-nine hundredths of the Letters I get are impertinent clutchings of me by the button, concerning which the one business is, How to get handsomely loose again; What to say that shall soonest end the intrusion,—­if saying Nothing will not be the best way.  Which last I often in my sorrow have recourse to, at what ever known risks.  “We must pay our tribute to Time”:  ah yes, yes;—­and yet I will believe, so long as we continue together in this sphere of things there will always be a potential Letter coming out of New England for me, and the world not fallen irretrievably dumb.—­The best