arted on the Sunday morning previous 'almost without a
struggle,' wrote his favourite sister Jane. It was a heavy stroke for
Carlyle. 'Natural tears,' he exclaimed shortly afterwards, 'have come to
my relief. I can look at my dear Father, and that section of the Past
which he has made alive for me, in a certain sacred, sanctified light,
and give way to what thoughts rise in me without feeling that they are
weak and useless.' Carlyle determined that the time till the funeral was
past (Friday) should be spent with his wife only. All others were
excluded. He walked 'far and much,' chiefly in the Regent's Park, and
considered about many things, his object being to see clearly what his
calamity meant--what he lost, and what lesson that loss was to teach
him. Carlyle considered his father as one of the most interesting men he
had known. 'Were you to ask me,' he said, 'which had the greater natural
faculty,' Robert Burns or my father, 'I might, perhaps, actually pause
before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider Education, my Father a
far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of Musical Utterance; the
other wholly a man of Action, even with Speech subservient thereto.
Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in
whom the endowment from Nature and the Arena from Fortune were so
utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly _know_
it. As a man of Speculation--had Culture ever unfolded him--he must have
gone wild and desperate as Burns; but he was a man of Conduct, and Work
keeps all right. What strange shapeable creatures we are!'[13] Nothing
that the elder Carlyle undertook to do but he did it faithfully, and
like a true man. 'I shall look,' said his distinguished son, 'on the
houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound
to the heart all over his little district. No one that comes after him
will ever say, "Here was the finger of a hollow eye-servant." They are
little texts for me of the gospel of man's free will. Nor will his deeds
and sayings in any case be found unworthy--not false and barren, but
genuine and fit. Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I
owe him much more than existence; I owe him a noble inspiring example
(now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he
_exclusively_ that determined on _educating_ me; that from his small
hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I
am or may become.