his voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound.  This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others.  On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought.  But it is the habit of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase.  Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness,—­no self-love.  It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror;—­it is his nature, and the untamable energy that has given him power to crush the dragons.  You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near.  He seems, to me, quite isolated,—­lonely as the desert,—­yet never was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood.  He finds them, but only in the past.  He sings, rather than talks.  He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally, near the beginning, hits upon some singular epithet, which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row.  For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd.  He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morgana, ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels.  His talk, like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly.  Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable.  He is a large subject.  I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it;—­his works are true, to blame and praise him,—­the Siegfried of England,—­great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil, than legislate for good.

Of Dr. Wilkinson I saw a good deal, and found him a substantial person,—­a sane, strong, and well-exercised mind,—­but in the last degree unpoetical in its structure.  He is very simple, natural, and good; excellent to see, though one cannot go far with him; and he would be worth more in writing, if he could get time to write, than in personal intercourse.  He may yet find time;—­he is scarcely more than thirty.  Dr. W. wished to introduce me to Mr. Clissold, but I had not time; shall find it, if in London again.  Tennyson was not in town.