e of the
popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon,--even Bacon,
--are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates,
the glory of the Greek world; but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and
Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has
given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has
not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching even
his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will
cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America. He talks
finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much
at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I
could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife,
and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for
a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed
down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of
city society." *

-------------
* _Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recollections of his Visits to England_
By Alexander Ireland. London, 1882, p. 58.
------------

Twenty-three years later, in his "English Traits," Emerson once
more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of
Carlyle.

"From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return I came
from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter
which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It
was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles
distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private
carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery
hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart.
Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to
hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world,
unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own
terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a
cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary
powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern
accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a
streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon. His
talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the
companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs,
and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a
pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, 'not
a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the mini