purify and strengthen me to enter the Paradise of thought once more.” In addressing Mrs. Emerson she sends “dear love to the sainted Lidian,” — who becomes simply Lidian in later messages. “Mrs. Emerson does not love me,” she says in one place, “more than I love her.”
On May 30, 1837, she returns to Emerson, Coleridge’s “Literary Remains,” which she has “ransacked pretty thoroughly,” and “The Friend,” with which she “should never have done;” also a volume of Goethe and one of Scougal, and she asks him on the outside of the note what these two worthies will be likely to say to one another “as they journey side by side.” She begs to keep for summer two volumes of Milton, two of Degerando, the seventh and eighth of Goethe’s “Nachgelassene Werke,” besides one volume of Jonson and one of Plutarch’s “Morals.” She also subscribes for two copies of Carlyle’s “Miscellanies.” Later she writes (November 25, 1839) to ask him “What is the ‘Harleyan (sic) Miscellany’? — an account of a library?” and says, “I thought to send Tennyson next time, but I cannot part with him, it must be for next pacquet (sic). I have been reading Milnes; he is rich in fine thoughts but not in fine poetry.”
One of the best passages in these letters of Margaret Fuller, a passage that has in it a flavor of Browning’s imaginative wealth, is a little sketch by her of the melancholy position of a queen who has borne no heir to the throne. It is only by
