roke the news to
him. 'I was sitting in sister Jean's at Dumfries,' Carlyle wrote a
fortnight after, 'thinking of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday,
and perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig two weeks or so
before, when the fatal telegrams, two of them in succession, came. It
had a kind of _stunning_ effect upon me. Not for above two days could I
estimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had
peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shattered my poor world to
universal ruin. They took me out next day to wander, as was medically
needful, in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and anon there rose
from my sick heart the ejaculation, "My poor little woman!" but no full
gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come. Will it ever? A stony
"Woe's me, woe's me!" sometimes with infinite tenderness and pity, not
for myself, is my habitual mood hitherto.'[35]

On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John set off for London. On
the Wednesday he was on his way to Haddington with the remains, his
brother and John Forster accompanying him. At 1 P.M. on Thursday the
funeral took place. 'In the nave of the old Abbey Kirk,' wrote her
disconsolate husband, 'long a ruin, now being saved from further decay,
with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and
the light of her face will never shine on me more.' When Mr Conway saw
him on his return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, 'Whatever triumph there
may have been in that now so darkly overcast day, was indeed _hers_.
Long, long years ago, she took her place by the side of a poor man of
humblest condition, against all other provisions for her, undertook to
share his lot for weal or woe; and in that office what she has been to
him and done for him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him
and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now only in the
knowledge of one man, and will presently be finally hid in his grave.'
As he touchingly expressed it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the
'light of his life' had assuredly 'gone out.' Universal sympathy was
felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very much affected by 'a
delicate, graceful, and even affectionate' message from the Queen,
conveyed by Lady Augusta Stanley through his brother John.

One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks of her: 'Her intellect
was as clear and incisive as his, yet altogether womanly in character;
her heart was as t