Jeannie Welsh Carlyle?

However, with all that may be said to the contrary, I do not think we
dare say that the marriage of Thomas and Jeannie was an unhappy one.
After reading fifteen hundred pages of biography and hundreds of
letters passing to and fro, I am of the belief of Mr. Tennyson, that
on the whole their union was a happy one.

Shortly after Carlyle had been elected Rector of the University of
Edinburgh, Jean died suddenly. While out driving one afternoon by Hyde
Park, she jumped out to pick up her little dog, over whose foot a
carriage had passed. She was never again seen alive. In her carriage
she was found dead with her hands folded on her lap. When Carlyle
heard of it he was away at Scotsbrig. Later in describing his feelings
he wrote: "It had a kind of _stunning_ effect on me. Not for above two
days could I estimate the immeasurable depth of it, or the infinite
sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and a moment shattered my
poor world to universal ruin." And Froude tells us that in Carlyle's
old age--he lived to be eighty-five--he often broke forth in these
passionate words of Burns:

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met and never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE
From a photograph from life]

XXXVI

CARLYLE AS LECTURER

In 1834, the year of the death of Coleridge, we find Carlyle, like
many another Scotchman, leaving Scotland to enter the great Babylon,
London. The previous six years he had passed with his wife at
Craigenputtock. He was almost forty years of age. His wife had great
confidence in his ability, which up to this time the world had not
recognized. So she urged him to struggle for influence and power in
the great heart of the modern world. Number 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, is
the house they selected. There for the remaining forty-seven years of
his life he worked and loved and stormed. Their neighborhood was one
famous in association with the names of many _literati_. Near by
Smollett wrote _Count Fathom_; in the same locality More had
entertained the great scholar, Erasmus; there too had once lived
Bolingbroke, and earlier, the Count de Grammont; and last but not
least the author of Abou Ben Adhem, Leigh Hunt.

When Emerson once suggested to Carlyle that he come over to America to
lecture, Carlyle took kindly to the idea. He kept it in mind as a
possibility for years, but he