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 hillfarm, as if holding in 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. . . . 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. .. We went out to walk over the long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. There we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul."

This "talk" must be to us solely of our own liking and formation, based upon what we can glean of the views of these two friends; for what else on this point is given us by Emerson is vague and suggestive only. "It was not Carlyle's fault," he continues, "that we talked on that topic, for he had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no steps can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognisant of the subtle links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future.

Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time has only a relative existence.

What a subject is thus opened up for speculation! I remember as a youth reading and re-reading the account of this meeting, and piecing together in my mind the lines which possibly might have been taken by the talkers. All the charm of that early endeavour "to force by conjecture a passage into other people's thoughts recurs to me as I write the simple words which still have the old-time, mystical music about them: "There we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul."*

* Carlyle referred with enthusiasm to this meeting, and of their "quiet night of clear, fine talk." He spoke lovingly of the day "when that supernal vision, Waldo Emerson, dawned on him.'

It is currently reported that Carlyle liked to remember that other evening, in London, on which Tennyson and he sat in solemn silence smoking for hours. "Man Alfred," said Carlyle, as he bade his visitor good-night, 66 we have ha'en a graund nicht; come back again soon!"

Years afterwards, when Emerson again visited Carlyle, it is said that they sat by themselves a goodly portion of the evening, in the dark, talking only of God and immortality, as if anxious to discover whether their philosophy had thrown any clearer light on the all-absorbing topics discussed by them on the Scotch hills.*

At Kirkcaldy, long before this, Carlyle had made, or strengthened, an acquaintance with Edward Irving, like himself an Annandale man, like himself a student of divinity, and, once more, like himself, a teacher in a Kirkcaldy school. "By residents in Kirkcaldy," says Dix, "I

* "I must tell you a story Miss Bremer got from Emerson. Carlyle was very angry with him for not believing in a devil, and to convert him took him amongst all the horrors of London-the gin-shops, etc.—and finally to the House of Commons, plying him at every turn with the question, 'Do you believe in a devil noo?"-George Eliot to Sara Hennell, 3rd Nov., 1851.

no

have heard the two described as often seen walking on the sea-beach in earnest conversation, and doubt the doctrines of the Church, which both were preparing to enter, formed frequently a main portion of their talk, to which it would not be surprising if Carlyle contributed the sceptical, and Irving the believing, portion. It is curious that both these men should afterwards have made so very peculiar a figure in London, as stormy denouncers (each in his own fashion) of the established present, and prophets of a better future.”*

* What Carlyle wrote as an epitaph on Irving came forth hot and earnest, and direct from his heart. "He referred to his short life (forty-two years only) of his thorough truth, of his youth maturing in the Scotch solitudes-and, after abiding for a time in the cold northern city, of his being cast into this blazing Babylon, where he was at first smothered with caresses, and then denounced by the fickle, veering idolaters who crawled at his feet. Yet not a fact could be urged against him, except that his opinions differed from theirs. So they cast him down into the satanic pit, amongst