aldron; 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_
Humbug I have ever seen in this world; the emblem to me, he and
his talk and the worship and credence it found, of all the
miseries that can befall a Nation. I also conversed with Young
Ireland in a confidential manner; for Young Ireland, really
meaning what it says, is worth a little talk: the Heroism and
Patriotism of a new generation; welling fresh and new from the
breasts of Nature; and already poisoned by O'Connellism and the
_Old_ Irish atmosphere of bluster, falsity, fatuity, into one
knows not what. Very sad to see. On the whole, no man ought,
for any cause, to speak lies, or have anything to do with _lies;_
but either hold his tongue, or speak a bit of the truth: that is
the meaning of a _tongue,_ people used to know!--Ireland was not
the place to console my sorrows. I returned home very sad out of
Ireland;--and indeed have remained one of the saddest, idlest,
most useless of Adam's sons ever since; and do still remain so.
I care not to _write_ anything more,--so it seems to me at
present. I am in my vacant interlunar cave (I suppose that is
the truth);--and I ought to wrap my mantle round me, and lie, if
dark, _silent_ also. But, alas, I have wasted almost all your
poor sheet first!--

Miss Fuller came duly as you announced; was welcomed for your
sake and her own. A high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in
whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in
speech. A sharp, subtle intellect too; and less of that
shoreless Asiatic dreaminess than I have sometimes met with in
her writings. We liked one another very well, I think, and the
Springs too were favorites. But, on the whole, it could not be
concealed, least of all from the sharp female intellect, that
this Carlyle was a dreadfully heterodox, not to say a dreadfully
savage fellow, at heart; believing no syllable of all that
Gospel of Fraternity, Benevolence, and _new_ Heaven-on-Earth,
preached forth by all manner of "advanced" creatures, from George
Sand to Elihu Burritt, in these days; that in fact the said
Carlyle not only disbelieved all that, but treated it as
poisonous cant,--_sweetness_ of sugar-of-lead,--a detestable
_p