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peremptorily. "If the angel Gabriel had summoned 

 me I would not have gone," he said. It was too 

 soon to erect a monument to Scott, Let them wait 

 a hundred years and see how they feel about it 

 then. He had never met Scott : the nearest he had 

 come to it was once when he was the bearer of a 

 message to him from Goethe; he had rung at his 

 door with some trepidation, and was relieved when 

 told that the great man was out. Not long after- 

 wards he had a glimpse of him while standing in 

 the streets of Edinburgh. He saw a large wagon 

 coming drawn by several horses, and containing a 

 great many people, and there in the midst of them, 

 full of talk and hilarity like a great boy, sat Scott. 

 Carlyle had recently returned from his annual visit 

 to Scotland, and was full of sad and tender memo- 

 ries of his native land. He was a man in whom 

 every beautiful thing awakened melancholy thoughts. 

 He spoke of the blooming lasses and the crowds of 

 young people he had seen on the streets of some 

 northern city, Aberdeen, I think, as having filled 

 him with sadness; a kind of homesickness of the 

 soul was upon him, and deepened with age, — a 

 solitary and a bereaved man from first to last. 



As I walked Cheyne Eow that summer Sunday 

 my eye rested again and again upon those three 

 stone steps that led up to the humble door, each 

 hollowed out by the attrition of the human foot, 

 the middle one, where the force of the footfall 

 would be greatest, most deeply worn of all, — worn 

 by hundreds of famous feet, and many, many more 



