PROFESSOR TYNDALL. 639 



those who knew him best, the impression made by even these 

 great qualities might well be less vivid than that left by the 

 warmth of a tenderly affectionate nature. 



" If I pull through this it will be all your care, all your doing." 

 These words (I give them from memory), uttered the night before 

 his death, were meant for no ear but that of the tireless nurse, 

 watcher, secretary, servant, in case of need, to whom they were 

 addressed ; and whose whole life had been, for many years, de- 

 voted to the one object of preserving that of her husband. Ut- 

 terly hateful to me as are the violations of a privacy that should 

 be sacred, now too common, I have sought and obtained permis- 

 sion to commit this, and take all responsibility for it. For the 

 pitiful circumstances of Tyndall's death are known to all the 

 world ; and I think it well that all the world should be enabled 

 to see those circumstances by the light which shines forth, alike 

 on the dead and on the living, from the poor crumpled piece of 

 paper on which these treasured words were, at once, recorded. 



But I have wandered far from the year 1851 and its nascent 

 friendships. 



At that time Tyndall and I had long been zealous students of 

 Carlyle's works. Sartor Resartus and the Miscellanies were 

 among the few books devoured partly by myself, and partly by 

 the mighty hordes of cockroaches in my cabin, during the cruise 

 of the Rattlesnake ; and my sense of obligation to their author 

 was then, as it remains, extremely strong. Tyndall's apprecia- 

 tion of the seer of Chelsea was even more enthusiastic ; and, in 

 after-years, assumed a character of almost filial devotion. The 

 grounds of our appreciation, however, were not exactly the same. 

 My friend, I think, was disposed to regard Carlyle as a great 

 teacher ; I was rather inclined to take him as a great tonic ; as a 

 source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus and re- 

 freshment, rather than of theoretical or practical guidance. Half 

 a century ago the evangelical reaction which, for a time, had 

 braced English society was dying out, and a scum of rotten and 

 hypocritical conventionalism clogged art, literature, science, and 

 politics. I might quarrel with something every few paragraphs, 

 but passing from the current platitudes to Carlyle's vigorous 

 pages was like being transported from the stucco, pavement, and 

 fog of a London street to one of his own breezy moors. The 

 country was full of bowlders and bogs, to be sure, and by no 

 means calculated for building leases ; but oh the freshness and the 

 freedom of it ! 



Our divergent appreciation of Carlyle foreshadowed the only 

 serious strain to which our friendship was ever exposed. When 

 the old Cavalier and Roundhead spirit woke up all over England 



