tury really were. There is nothing told in these volumes
that will detract from the fame of either, but much that will add to the
kindly impression which they have made upon their time. One cannot but
think, as the letters grow more infrequent, and are written with greater
labor, of how old age was a weariness to these great men as to
others,--how the very grasshopper became a burden, and how
inexpressibly sad was the decay of their great powers. Emerson begins to
lag first, although a few years younger than Carlyle, and Carlyle
implores him, almost piteously, to write. There is an interval of one,
two, and even three years in the correspondence toward the end; and
after Emerson's last visit to England they wrote no more. Carlyle's
gentleness and tenderness show themselves very beautifully in these last
letters to his one best friend. When he finds that it has become hard
for Emerson to write, he begs at first that he be not forsaken, but
after a little says in effect: Never mind, my friend, if it wearies you
to write, write to me no more. I will still write to you, and thus our
friendship shall not lack for a voice. When the sweet bells had become a
little jangled in Emerson's brain, when memory had left him or played
him false, and there was a weakening of all his powers,--he sat still in
his own home among his friends and kindred, his household intact, and
surrounded by the fondest care and affection; while his old friend over
the seas--the broken giant, the god of thunder, now grown silent--sat in
utter desolation in the home he had reared after infinite struggle and
endeavor, and wrapped in a solitude so utter and so black that the heart
which can look upon it without pity must be a heart of stone. Carlyle
died on the 5th of April, 1881, being eighty-five years old. Emerson
died on the 27th of April, 1882, at the age of seventy-nine. In death
they were not long divided.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

THOMAS CARLYLE.

Carlyle is one of the many great men who have suffered severely at the
hands of their biographers, and from the pen clan in general. When the
world knew him alone or chiefly through the lurid splendors of "The
French Revolution,"--that book which, as he himself would have expressed
it, was a truth, though a truth written in hell-fire,--or through the
uncanny labyrinths of "Sartor Resartus," or the subtle analysis of the
"Hero-Worship," or the more pleasing pages of his "Burns," or "Milton