AN OCTOBER ABROAD 205 



upon subjects to which he has devoted a lifetime 

 of profound thought and meditation. With such 

 persons he has no patience." 



. Carlyle had just returned from Scotland, where 

 he had spent the summer. The Scotch hills and 

 mountains, he said, had an ancient, mournful look, 

 as if the weight of immeasurable time had settled 

 down upon them. Their look was in Ossian, — his 

 spirit reflected theirs ; and as I gazed upon the ven- 

 erable man before me, and noted his homely and 

 rugged yet profound and melancholy expression, I 

 knew that their look was upon him also, and that a 

 greater than Ossian had been nursed amid those lonely 

 hills. Few men in literature have felt the burden 

 of the world, the weight of the inexorable conscience, 

 as has Carlyle, or drawn such fresh inspiration from 

 that source. However we may differ from him 

 (and almost in self-defense one must differ from a 

 man of such intense and overweening personality), 

 it must yet be admitted that he habitually speaks out 

 of that primitive silence and solitude in which only 

 the heroic soul dwells. Certainly not in contempo- 

 rary British literature is there another writer whose 

 bowstring has such a twang. 



I left London in the early part of November, and 

 turned my face westward, going leisurely through 

 England and Wales, and stringing upon my thread 

 a few of the famous places, as Oxford, Stratford, 

 Warwick, Birmingham, Chester, and taking a last 

 look of the benign land. The weather was fair; I 

 was yoked to no companion, and was apparently the 



