he was, till lately I noticed in the Newspapers that he had gone home again.  A certain Mr. Brown (I think) brought me a letter from you, not long since; I forwarded him to Cambridge and Scotland:  a modest inoffensive man.  He said he had never personally met with Emerson.  My Wife recalled to him the story of the Scotch Traveler on the top of Vesuvius:  “Never saw so beautiful a scene in the world!”—­“Nor I,” replied a stranger standing there, “except once; on the top of Dunmiot, in the Ochil Hills in Scotland.”—­“Good Heavens!  That is a part of my Estate, and I was never there!  I will go thither.”  Yes, do!—­We have seen no other Transoceanic that I remember.  We expect your Book soon!  We know the subject of your Winter Lectures too; at least Miss Martineau thinks she does, and makes us think so.  Heaven speed the work!  Heaven send my good Emerson a clear utterance, in all right ways, of the nobleness that dwells in him!  He knows what silence means; let him know speech also, in its season the two are like canvas and pigment, like darkness and light-image painted thereon; the one is essential to the other, not possible without the other.

Poor Miss Martineau is in Newcastle-on-Tyne this winter; sick, painfully not dangerously; with a surgical brother-in-law.  Her meagre didacticalities afflict me no more; but also her blithe friendly presence cheers me no more.  We wish she were back.  This silence, I calculate, forced silence, will do her much good.  If I were a Legislator, I would order every man, once a week or so, to lock his lips together, and utter no vocable at all for four-and-twenty hours:  it would do him an immense benefit, poor fellow.  Such racket, and cackle of mere hearsay and sincere-cant, grows at last entirely deafening, enough to drive one mad, —­like the voice of mere infinite rookeries answering your voice!  Silence, silence!  Sterling sent you a Letter from Clifton, which I set under way here, having added the address.  He is not well again, the good Sterling; talks of Madeira this season again:  but I hope otherwise.  You of course read his sublime “article”?  I tell him it was—­a thing untellable!

Mr. Southey has fallen, it seems, into a mournful condition:  oblivion, mute hebetation, loss of all faculty.  He suffered greatly, nursing his former wife in her insanity, for years till her relief by death; suffered, worked, and made no moan; the brunt of the task over, he sank into collapse in the hands of a new wife he had just wedded.  What a lot for him; for her especially!  The most excitable but most methodic man I have ever seen. [Greek] that is a word that awaits us all.—­I have my brother here at present; though talking of Lisbon with his Buccleuchs.  My Wife seems better than of late winters.  I actually had a Horse, nay actually have it, though it has gone to the country till the mud abate again!  It did me perceptible good; I mean to try it farther.  I am no longer so desperately poor as I have been for twelve years back; sentence of starvation or beggary seems revoked at last, a blessedness really very considerable.  Thanks, thanks!  We send a thousand regards to the two little ones, to the two mothers. Valete nostrum memores.