--

"By the calamity of last April I lost my little all in this world,
and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a
_home_ for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true, and noble was
that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in
all the rocky ways and climbings; I am forever poor without her.
She was snatched from me in a moment as by a death from the gods.
Very beautiful her death was; radiantly to those who understood it,
had all her life been: _quid plura?_"

This which follows in the same letter, written while Carlyle was still
in the unbroken possession of his faculties, makes us not only sad but
indignant that his determination had not been allowed to be carried out;
and that the poor old man, when broken down by age, should have been
permitted to expose to view all those sacred things which, when sane and
sound, he would so carefully have covered from the prying eyes of the
world. He says:--

"All summer last my one solacement in the form of work was writing
and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out
again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without
return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of
worship,--the only devout time I had had for a great while past.
These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the
way before I myself die; but such continues still mainly my
employment, to me if to no other useful. To reduce matters to
writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins
and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better
than you ever did before. To set about writing my own life would be
no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be
done. The common, impious, vulgar of this earth--what has it to do
with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant
azure of eternity swallow me; for my share of it, that verily is
the handsomest or one handsome way of settling my poor account with
the _canaille_ of mankind, extant and to come."

How would his sad old heart have been torn could he have foreseen that
in the weakness of senility he would expose to the 'impious vulgar' all
the most sacred secrets of his home life! Oh, the pity of it! As a
slight offset to the sad revelations thus made, let us accept this
little note in