Carlyle had now fairly started as an original writer.  From the lonely farm of Craigenputtoch went forth the brilliant series of Essays contributed to the Edinburgh, Westminster, and Foreign Reviews, and to Fraser’s Magazine, which were not long in gaining for him a literary reputation in both hemispheres.  To this lonely farm came one day in August, 1833, armed with a letter of introduction, a visitor from the other side of the Atlantic:  a young American, then unknown to fame, by name Ralph Waldo Emerson.  The meeting of these two remarkable men was thus described by the younger of them, many years afterwards:—­

“I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtoch.  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 humour, which floated everything he looked upon.  His talk playfully exalting the 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 shewn 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 labour.  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.