le thundered: "Jane, stop breathing so loud!" Long years
before Jane had stopped doing everything else except breathe. And so,
obedient to the injunction, a few days afterward she ceased "breathing
so loud."

When a few weeks had gone by Carlyle discovered, through reading her
journal, that his wife had for want of affection frozen and starved to
death within his home like some poor traveler who had fallen in the
snows beyond the door. For years, without his realizing it, she had
kept all the wheels oiled, kept his body in health and his mind in
happiness. Only when it was too late did the husband realize that his
fame was largely his wife's. Then did the old man begin his pathetic
pilgrimage to his wife's grave, where Froude often found him murmuring:
"If I had only known! If I had only known!" For all his supreme gifts
and rare talents were marred by harshness. Intellectual brilliancy
weighs light as punk against the gold of gentleness and character.
Half Carlyle's books, weighted by a gentle, noble spirit, would have
availed more for social progress than these many volumes with the bad
taste they leave in the mouth. The sign of ripeness in an apple, a
peach, is beauty, and the test of character is gentleness and kindness
of heart.

One of the crying needs of society is a revival of gentleness and of a
refined considerateness in judging others. There is no disposition
that cuts at the very root of character like harshness, and there is
nothing that blights happiness and breeds discord like unlovingness and
severity of judgment. We hear much of industrial strife, social
warfare and want of sympathy between the classes. Be it remembered,
gentleness alone can be invoked to heal the breach. There is a legend
that when Jacob with his family and flocks met Esau with his children
and herds, the angels of God hovered in the air above the two brothers
and began to rain gifts down upon their companies. Strangely enough,
each forgetting the gifts falling in his own camp, rushed forth to pick
up the gifts falling in that of his brother. There was anger stirred.
Epithets and stones began to fly, until all the air was filled with
flying weapons. In such a scrimmage the messengers of peace had no
place. Soon the sound of receding wings died out of the air, the gifts
ceased to fall and all things faded into the light of common day. This
legend interprets to us how harshness breeds strife and robs man of his
gifts