haste to Mainhill to a consultation, and the result was a letter which shows the touching affection with which the Carlyles clung to one another. J. A. Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle. Mainhill, February 1820. I have just arrived from Annan, and we are all so uneasy on your account that at the request of my father in particular, and of all the rest, I am determined to write to call on you for a speedy answer. Your father and mother, and all of us, are extremely anxious that you should come home directly if possible, if you think you can come without danger. And we trust that, notwithstanding the bitterness of last summer, you will still find it emphatically a home. My mother bids me call upon you to do so by every tie of affection, and by all that is sacred. She esteems seeing you again and administering comfort to you as her highest felicity. Your father, also, is extremely anxious to see you again at home. The room is much more comfortable than it was last season. The roads are re paired, and all things more convenient; and we all trust that you will yet reoover, after you shall have inhaled your native breezes and escaped once more from the unwholesome city of Edinburgh, and its selfish and unfeeling inhabitants. In the name of all, then, I call upon you not to neglect or refuse our earnest wishes; to come home and experience the comforts of parental and brotherly affection, which, though rude and without polish, is yet sincere and honest. The father adds a postscript: My dear Tom, I have been very uneasy about you ever since we received your moving letter, and I thought to have written to you myself this day and told you all my thoughts about your health, which is the foundation and copestone of all our earthly comfort. But, being particularly engaged this day, I caused John to write. Come home as soon as possible, and for ever oblige, Dear sir, your loving father, JAMES CARLYLE. The fright had been unnecessary. Dyspepsia, while it tortures body and mind, does little serious injury. The attack had passed off. A letter from Carlyle was already on the way, in which the illness was scarcely noticed; it contained little but directions for his brothers' studies, and an offer of ten pounds out of his scantily filled purse to assist Sandy' on the farm. With his family it was impossible for him to talk freely, and through this gloomy time he had but one friend, though he was of priceless value. To Irving he had written out his discontent. He was now disgusted with law, and meant to abandon it. Irving, pressed as he was with work, could always afford Carlyle the best of his time and judgment. Edward Irving to Thomas Carlyle. Glasgow, March 14, 1820. Since I received your last epistle, which reminded me of some of those gloomy scenes of nature I have often had the greatest pleasure in contemplating, I have been wrought almost to death, having had three sermons to write, and one of them a charity sermon; but I shall make many sacrifices before I shall resign the entertainment and benefit I derive from our correspondence. Your mind is of too penetrating a cast to rest satisfied with the frail disguise which the happiness of ordinary life has thrown on to hide its nakedness, and I do never augur that your nature is to be satisfied with its sympathies. Indeed, I am convinced that were you translated into the most elegant and informed circle of this city, you would find it please only by its novelty, and perhaps refresh by its variety; but you would be constrained to seek the solid employment and the lasting gratification of your mind elsewhere. The truth is, life is a thing formed for the average of men, and it is only in those parts of our nature which are of average possession that it can gratify. The higher parts of our nature find their entertainment in sympathising with the highest efforts of our species, which are, and will continue, confined to the closet of the sage, and can never find their station in the drawing-rooms of the talking world. Indeed, I will go higher and say that the highest parts of our nature can never have their proper food till they turn to contemplate the excellencies of our Creator, and not only to contemplate but to imitate them. Therefore it is, my dear Carlyle, that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which they receive them, and the ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of it, but of your feelings and affections, which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of mind. There is just another panacea for your griefs (which are not imaginary, but for which I see a real ground in the too penetrating and, at times perhaps, too severe turn of your mind); but though I judge it better and more worthy than reserve, it is perhaps more difficult of practice. I mean the habit of using our superiority for the information and improvement of others. This I reckon both the most dignified and the most kindly course that one can take, founded upon the great principles of human improvement, and founded upon what I am wont, or at least would wish, to make my pattern, the example of the Saviour of men, who endured, in His errand of salvation, the contradiction of men. But I confess, on the other hand, one meets with so few that are apt disciples, or willing to allow superiority, that will be constantly fighting with you upon the threshold, that it is very heartless, and forces one to reserve. And besides, one is so apt to fancy a superiority where there is none, that it is likely to produce overmuch self-complacency. But I see I am beginning to prose, and therefore shall change the subject-with only one remark, that your tone of mind reminds me more than anything of my own when under the sense of great religious imperfection, and anxiously pursuing after higher Christian attainments. ... I have read your letter again, and, at the risk of further prosing, I shall have another hit at its contents. You talk of renouncing the law, and you speak mysteriously of hope springing up from another quarter. I pray that it may soon be turned into enjoyment. But I would not have you renounce the law unless you coolly think that this new view contains those fields of happiness, from the want of which the prospect of law has become so dreary. Law has within it scope ample enough for any mind. The reformation which it needs, and which with so much humour and feeling you describe, is the very evidence of what I say. Did Adam Smith find the commercial system less encumbered? (I know he did not find it more); and see what order the mind of • I.e. the talk to which you usually treat your friends. one man has made there. Such a reformation must be wrought in law, and the spirit of the age is manifestly bending that way. I know none who, from his capacity of remembering and digesting facts, and of arranging them into general results, is so well fitted as yourself. With regard to my own affairs, I am becoming too much of a man of business, and too little a man of contemplation. I meet with few minds to excite me, many to drain me off, and, by the habit of discharging and receiving nothing in return, I am run off to the very lees as you may easily discern. I have a German master and a class in college. I have seen neither for a week, such is the state of my engagements engagements with I know not what; with preaching in St. John's once a week, and employing the rest of the week in visiting objects in which I can learn nothing, unless I am collecting for a new series of Tales of my Landlord, which should range among Radicals and smugglers. Dr. Chalmers, though a most entire original by himself, is surrounded with a very prosaical sort of persons, who please me something by their zeal to carry into effect his philosophical schemes, and vex me much by their idolatry of him. My comforts are in hearing the distresses of the people, and doing my mite to alleviate them. They are not in the higher walks (I mean as to wealth) in which I am permitted to move, nor yet in the greater publicity and notoriety I enjoy. Every minister in Glasgow is an oracle to a certain class of devotees. I would not give one day in solitude or in meditation with a friend as I have enjoyed it often along the sands of Kirkcaldy for ages in this way. Yours, most truly, It does not appear what the other quarter' may have been on which the prospect was brightening. Carlyle was not more explicit to his mother, to whom he wrote at this time a letter unusually gentle and melancholy. Thomas Carlyle to Mrs. Carlyle. Edinburgh, March 29, 1820. To you, my dear mother, I can never be sufficiently grateful, not only for the common kindness of a mother, but for the unceasing watchfulness with which you strove to instil virtuous principles into my young mind; and though we are separated at present, and may be still more widely separated, I hope the lessons which you taught will never be effaced from my memory. I cannot say how I have fallen into this train of thought, but the days of childhood arise with so many pleasing recollections, and shine so brightly across the tempests and inquietudes of succeeding times, that I felt unable to resist the impulse. You already know that I am pretty well as to health, and also that I design to visit you again before many months have elapsed. I cannot say that my prospects have got much brighter since I left you; the aspect of the future is still as unsettled as ever it was; but some degree of patience is behind, and hope, the charmer, that 'springs eternal in the human breast,' is yet here likewise. I am not of a humour to care very much for good or evil fortune, so far as concerns myself. The thought that my somewhat uncertain condition gives you uneasiness chiefly grieves me. Yet I would not have you despair of your ribe of a boy. He will do something yet. He is a shy stingy soul, and very likely has a higher notion of his parts than others have. But, on the other hand, he is not incapable of diligence. He is harmless, and possesses the virtue of his country—thrift; so that, after all, things will yet be right in the end. My love to all the little ones. Your affectionate son, T. CARLYLE. The University term ends early in Scotland. The expenses of the six months which the students spend at college are paid for in many instances by the bodily labours of the other six. The end of April sees them all dispersed, the class room closed, the pupils no longer obtainable; and the law studies being finally abandoned, Carlyle had nothing more to do at Edinburgh, and migrated with the rest. He was going home; he offered himself for a visit to Irving at Glasgow on the way, and the proposal was warmly accepted. The Irving correspondence was not long continued; and I make the most of the letters of so remarkable a man which were written while he was still himself, before his intellect was clouded. Edward Irving to T. Carlyle. 34 Kent Street, Glasgow: April 15, 1820. My dear Carlyle,-Right happy shall I be to have your company and conversation for ever so short a time, and the longer the better; and if you could contrive to make your visit so that the beginning of the week should be the time of your departure, I could bear you company on your road a day's journey. I have just finished my sermon-Saturday at six o'clock-at which I have been sitting without interruption since ten; but I resolved that you should have my letter tomorrow, that nothing might prevent your promised visit, to which I hold you now altogether bound. It is very dangerous to speak one's mind here about the state of the country. I reckon, however, the Radicals have in a manner expatriated themselves from the political co-operation of the better classes; and, at the same time, I believe there was sympathy enough in the middle and well-informed people to have caused a melioration of our political evils, had they taken time and legal measures. I am very sorry for the poor; they are losing their religion, their domestic comfort, their pride of independence, their everything; if timeous remedies come not soon, they will sink, I fear, into the degradation of the Irish peasantry; and if that class goes down, then along with it sinks the morality of every other class. We are at a complete stand here; a sort of military glow has taken all ranks. They can see the houses of the poor ransacked for arms without uttering an interjection of grief on the fallen greatness of those who brought in our Reformation and our civil liberty, and they will hardly suffer a sympathising word from any one. Dr. Chalmers takes a safe course in all these difficulties. The truth is, he does not side with any party. He has a few political nostrums so peculiar that they serve to detach his ideal mind both from Whigs and Tories and Radicals-that Britain would have been as flourishing and full of capital though there had been round the island a brazen wall a thousand cubits high; that the national debt does us neither good nor ill, amounting to nothing more or less than a mortgage upon property, &c. The Whigs dare not speak. The philanthropists are so much taken up, each with his own locality, as to take little charge of the general concern; and so the Tories have room to rage and talk big about armaments and pikes and battles. They had London well fortified yesterday by the Radicals, and so forth. Now it will be like the unimprisoning of a bird to come and let me have free talk. Not that I have anything to say in favour of Radicalism, for it is the very destitution of philosophy and religion and political economy; but that we may lose ourselves so delightfully in reveries upon the emendation of the State, to which, in fact, you and I can bring as little help as we could have done against the late inundation of the Vallois. I like the tone of your last letter; for, remember, I read your very tones and gestures, at this distance of place, through your letter, though it be not the most diaphanous of bodies. I have no more fear of your final success than Noah had of the Deluge ceasing; and though the first dove returned, as you say you are to return to your father's shelter, without even a leaf, yet the next time, believe me, you shall return with a leaf; and yet another time, and you shall take a flight who knows where? But of this and other things I delay further parley. Yours affectionately, EDWARD IRVING. Carlyle went to Glasgow, spent several days there, noting, according to his habit, the outward signs of men and things. He saw the Glasgow merchants in the Tontine, he observed them, fine, clean, opulent, with their shining bald crowns and serene white heads, sauntering about or reading their newspapers. He criticised the dresses of the young ladies, for whom he had always an eye, remarking that with all their charms they had less taste in their adornments than were to be seen in Edinburgh drawing-rooms. He saw Chalmers too, and heard him preach. Never preacher went so into one's heart.' Some private talk, too, there was with Chalmers, the doctor' explaining to him a new scheme for proving the truth of Christianity, all written in us already in sympathetic ink; Bible awakens it, and you can read.' But the chief interest in the Glasgow visit lies less in itself than in what followed it—a conversation between two young, then unknown men, walking alone together over a Scotch moor, the most trifling of actual incidents, a mere feather floating before the wind, yet, like the feather, marking the direction of the invisible tendency of human thought. Carlyle was to walk home to Ecclefechan. Irving had agreed to accompany him fifteen miles of his road, and then leave him and return. They started early, and breakfasted on the way at the manse of a Mr. French. Carlyle himself tells the rest. Drumclog Moss is the next object that survives, and Irving and I sitting by ourselves under the silent bright skies among the 'peat hags' of Drumclog with a world all silent round us. These peat hags are still pictured in me; brown bog all pitted and broken with heathy remnants and bare abrupt wide holes, four or five feet deep, mostly dry at present; a flat wilderness of broken bog, of quagmire not to be trusted (probably wetter in old days, and wet still in rainy seasons). Clearly a good place for Cameronian preaching, and dangerously difficult for Claverse and horse soldiery if the suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them! Scott's novels had given the Claverse skirmish here, which all Scotland knew of already, a double interest in those days. I know not that we talked much of this; but we did of many things, perhaps more confidentially than ever before; a colloquy the sum of which is still mournfully beautiful to me though the details are gone. I remember us sitting on the brow of a peat hag, the sun shining, our own voices the one sound. Far far away to the westward over our brown horizon, towered up, white and visible at the many miles of distance, a high irregular pyramid. 'Ailsa Craig' we at once guessed, and thought of the seas and oceans over yonder. But we did not long dwell on that-we seem to have seen no human creature, after French, to have had no bother and no need of human assistance or society, not even of refection, French's breakfast perfectly sufficing us. The talk had grown ever friendlier, more interesting. At length the declining sun said |