teresting to read what the man visited had to say about his
visitor: "That man," Carlyle said to Lord Houghton, "came to see me. I
don't know what brought him, and we kept him one night, and then he
left us. I saw him go up the hill; I didn't go with him to see him
descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel."

[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON
From a wood engraving of a life photograph]

In writing of this interview, Mr. Cabot, one of the biographers of
Emerson, says: "To Emerson the interview was a happy one, and
gratified the chief wish he had in coming to England, though he did
not find all that he had sought. He had been looking for a master, but
in the deepest matters Carlyle, he found, had nothing to teach him.
'My own feeling,' he says in a letter to Mr. Ireland a few days
afterwards, 'was that I had met with men of far less power who had got
greater insight into religious truth.' But he had come close to the
affectionate nature and the nobility of soul that lay behind the cloud
of whim and dyspepsia, and he kept to that, and for the rest, confined
his expectations thenceforth to what Carlyle had to give. 'The
greatest power of Carlyle,' he afterwards wrote, 'like that of Burke,
seems to me to reside in the form. Neither of them is a poet, born to
announce the will of the god, but each has a splendid rhetoric to
clothe the truth.'"

During this first visit Emerson dined with Lafayette and a hundred
Americans. By the time he made his second visit Emerson was a far more
distinguished man than during his first trip. His second visit was
made in 1847. This time he was a lion among men. He again calls on the
Carlyles. This time the door is opened by Jane.

"They were very little changed (he writes) from their old selves of
fourteen years ago, when I left them at Craigenputtock. 'Well,' said
Carlyle, 'here we are, shoveled together again.' The flood-gates of
his talk are quickly opened and the river is a great and constant
stream. We had large communication that night until nearly one
o'clock, and at breakfast next morning it began again. At noon or
later we went together, Carlyle and I, to Hyde Park and the palaces,
about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the
Strand--Carlyle melting all Westminster and London down into his talk
and laughter as he walked. We came back to dinner at five or later,
then Dr. Carlyle came in and spent the evening, which again was long
by