Here was a writer
whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words
stood for realities. His power was slowly acknowledged. As yet
Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his
contemporaries.

He was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope,"
at Craigenputtock. On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his
Journal as follows: "I am left here the solitariest, stranded,
most helpless creature that I have been for many years.....
Nobody asks me to work at articles. The thing I want to write is
quite other than an article... In _all_ times there is a word
which spoken to men; to the actual generation of men, would
thrill their inmost soul. But the way to find that word? The
way to speak it when found?" The next entry in his Journal shows
that Carlyle had found the word. It is the name "Ralph Waldo
Emerson," the record of Emerson's unexpected visit. "I shall
never forget the visitor," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, long afterwards,
"who years ago, in the Desert, descended on us, out of the clouds
as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us,
and left me weeping that it was only one day."

At the time of this memorable visit Emerson was morally not less
solitary than Carlyle; he was still less known; his name had
been unheard by his host in the desert. But his voice was soon
to become also the voice of a leader. With temperaments sharply
contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances
radically different, with views of life and of the universe
widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in
sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same
foundation of principle. In their independence and their
sincerity they were alike; they were united in their faith in
spiritual truth, and their reverence for it. Their modes of
thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent,
and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference,
they knew, as Carlyle said, that beneath it "the rock-strata,
miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one"

Two days after Emerson's visit Carlyle wrote to his mother:--

"Three little happinesses have befallen us: first, a piano-tuner,
procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here,
entirely reforming the piano, so that I can hear a little music
now, which does me no little good. Secondly, Major Irving, of
Gribton, who used at this season of the year to live