Mr. Spring, a merchant of great moral merits, (and, as I am informed, an assiduous reader of your 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-Caldron; to be boiled into horrid dissolution; whether into new youth, into sound healthy life, or into eternal death and annihilation, one does not yet know!  Daniel O’Connell stood bodily before me, in his green Mullaghmart Cap; haranguing his retinue of Dupables:  certainly the most sordid