The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. I | Page 5

in the piece called
'Characteristics,' pointed. He replied that he was not competent to state even to
himself,--he waited rather to see. My own feeling was that I had met with men of far less
power who had got greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess from his
papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives and loves everybody, and wishes
each to struggle on in his own place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for
eminent men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse 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 minister of Dunscore'; so that books inevitably made his topics.
"He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. Blackwood's was
the 'sand magazine'; Fraser's nearer approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine';
a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave of the last
sixpence.' When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to
admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining
the poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen; but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had
found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man
the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death, _Qualis artifex
pereo!_ better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him.
At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle was
mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the American principle. The best thing he
knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in
Stewart's book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been
shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey.
"We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when
pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from
the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was
one