Nothing that Emerson ever wrote with specific reference to Margaret Fuller came quite so close to framing a judgment on her European enterprise as a letter that he composed in October 1857, meant for, but apparently never sent to, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, who was just then tracing the footsteps of her departed friend through Rome and the Brownings' Florence. It is a superb letter, full of those surprising phrases that the mature Emerson so eminently commanded, and suffused, too, with an autumnal feeling of inner and outer weather. “You will never write me again, I have been so ungrateful,” he begins, “I who value every line & word from you, or about you. Perhaps 'tis my too much writing in youth that makes it so repulsive in these old days.”