60 FRESH FIELDS 



sess him. "The Hill I first saw the Sun rise 

 over," he says in "Past and Present," "when the 

 Sun and I and all things were yet in their auroral 

 hour, who can divorce me from it? Mystic, deep 

 as the world's centre, are the roots I have struck 

 into my Native Soil; no tree that grows is rooted 

 so. " How that mournful retrospective glance haunts 

 his pages! His race, generation upon generation, 

 had toiled and wrought here amid the lonely moors, 

 had wrestled with poverty and privation, had wrung 

 the earth for a scanty subsistence, till they had 

 become identified with the soil, kindred with it. 

 How strong the family ties had grown in the strug- 

 gle; how the sentiment of home was fostered! 

 Then the Carlyles were men who lavished their 

 heart and conscience upon their work; they builded 

 themselves, their days, their thoughts and sorrows, 

 into their houses; they leavened the soil with the 

 sweat of their rugged brows. When James Car- 

 lyle, his father, after a lapse of fifty years, saw 

 Auldgarth bridge, upon which he had worked as a 

 lad, he was deeply moved. When Carlyle in his 

 turn saw it, and remembered his father and all he 

 had told him, he also was deeply moved. "It 

 was as if half a century of past time had fatefully 

 for moments turned back." Whatever these men 

 touched with their hands in honest toil became 

 sacred to them, a page out of their own lives. A 

 silent, inarticulate kind of religion they put into 

 their work. All this bore fruit in their distin- 

 guished descendant. It gave him that reverted, 



