October, 1847

“I found at Liverpool, after a couple of days, a letter which had been seeking me, from Carlyle, addressed to ’R.W.E. on the instant when he lands in England,’ conveying the heartiest welcome and urgent invitation to house and hearth.  And finding that I should not be wanted for a week in the Lecture-rooms I came down to London on Monday, and, at ten at night, the door was opened by Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the hall.  They were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen years ago (in August), when I left them at Craigenputtock.  ‘Well,’ said Carlyle, ’here we are shoveled together again.’  The floodgates of his talk are quickly opened, and the river is a plentiful stream.  We had a wide talk that night until nearly one o’clock, and at breakfast next morning again.  At noon or later we walked forth to Hyde Park and the Palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, Carlyle melting all Westminster and London into his talk and laughter, as he goes.  Here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and Carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company.  An immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; I think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him.  My few hours discourse with him, long ago, in Scotland, gave me not enough knowledge of him; and I have now at last been taken by surprise by him.”

“C. and his wife live on beautiful terms.  Their ways are very engaging, and, in her bookcase, all his books are inscribed to her, as they came from year to year, each with some significant lines.”

“I had a good talk with C. last night.  He says over and over, for months, for years, the same thing.  Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice; and he, too, says that there is properly no religion in England.  He is quite contemptuous about ’Kunst,’ also, in Germans, or English, or Americans;* and has a huge respect for the Duke of Wellington, as the only Englishman, or the only one in the Aristocracy, who will have nothing to do with any manner of lie.”

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* See English Traits, Ch.  XVI.;  and Life of Sterling, Part
II.  Ch.  VII.   “Among the windy gospels addressed to our poor
century there are few louder than this of Art.”
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The following sentences are of later date than the preceding:—­

“Carlyle had all the kleinstadtlich traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent which made light of the British Islands.”

“Carlyle has a hairy strength which makes his literary vocation a mere chance, and what seems very contemptible to him.  I could think only of an enormous trip-hammer with an ‘Aeolian attachment."’