138 MEMORIAL SKETCH. 



Carlyle the more vivid intellectual stimulus ; but Emerson 

 had for him by far the stronger moral charm, and awakened 

 in him the more enthusiastic admiration. When he 

 visited Concord, he eagerly gathered up the memories 

 of the beauty and nobility of Emerson's life, though he 

 had often failed to follow him with assent or even with 

 comprehension along the dizzy heights of his discourse. 

 Emerson's flashing glances into the manifold relations of 

 things were, indeed, as different as possible from the slow 

 and cautious steps with which Dr. Carpenter felt his way 

 through facts to principles. He would go no further than 

 the most careful reasoning allowed him ; but he admitted 

 into the elements on which his reasoning was to be based 

 certain primary powers, affections, and sentiments, which 

 he found in his own heart, and saw in various forms in the 

 consciousness of the race. Nor was he disturbed in his 

 estimate of their value, because it might be possible to 

 show their origin and trace the history of their growth. 

 The obligations of conscience were not, in his view, 

 stripped of their Divine authority, even though the con- 

 tents of its specific decisions depended on the long evolu- 

 tion of experience. So he seemed to many to balance and 

 harmonize different aspects of scientific, moral, and religious 

 truth with a well-tempered wisdom ; giving to reason its 

 fullest play over the widest range of outward and inward 

 facts, he rose to be a kind of sage in the intellectual and 

 theological world around him. Teachers and students, 

 men of thought and feeling, and men of the world and 

 affairs, discerned in him an unusual breadth of sympathy, 

 and a rare combination of gifts, each of which was culti- 

 vated to its fullest capacity. The simplicity of his aims 

 flowed forth from a rich and sound humanity. 



" He was one of my oldest friends," said Sir James 

 Paget," after his death, " a friend of more than forty years ; 



