he genius of Carlyle was unlimited; and
she foresaw that, after he had toiled and striven, he would come into
his great reward, which she would share. Irving might be the leader of
a petty sect, but Carlyle would be a man whose name must become known
throughout the world.

And so, in 1826, she had made her choice, and had become the bride of
the rough-spoken, domineering Scotsman who had to face the world with
nothing but his creative brain and his stubborn independence. She had
put aside all immediate thought of London and its lures; she was going
to cast in her lot with Carlyle's, largely as a matter of calculation,
and believing that she had made the better choice.

She was twenty-six and Carlyle was thirty-two when, after a brief
residence in Edinburgh, they went down to Craigenputtock. Froude has
described this place as the dreariest spot in the British dominions:

The nearest cottage is more than a mile from it; the elevation, seven
hundred feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the garden
produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands, with the
scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape
is unredeemed by grace or grandeur--mere undulating hills of grass and
heather, with peat bogs in the hollows between them.

Froude's grim description has been questioned by some; yet the actual
pictures that have been drawn of the place in later years make it look
bare, desolate, and uninviting. Mrs. Carlyle, who owned it as an
inheritance from her father, saw the place for the first time in March,
1828. She settled there in May; but May, in the Scottish hills, is
almost as repellent as winter. She herself shrank from the adventure
which she had proposed. It was her husband's notion, and her own, that
they should live there in practical solitude. He was to think and
write, and make for himself a beginning of real fame; while she was to
hover over him and watch his minor comforts.

It seemed to many of their friends that the project was quixotic to a
degree. Mrs. Carlyle delicate health, her weak chest, and the beginning
of a nervous disorder, made them think that she was unfit to dwell in
so wild and bleak a solitude. They felt, too, that Carlyle was too much
absorbed with his own thought to be trusted with the charge of a
high-spirited woman.

However, the decision had been made, and the newly married couple went
to Craigenputtock, with wagons that carried their household goo