IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY. 65 



Carlyles. Generally, iu great men who emerge from 

 obscure peasant homes, the genius of the family takes 

 an enormous leap, or is completely metamorphosed ; 

 but Carlyle keeps all the paternal lineaments un- 

 faded ; he is his father and his mother, touched to 

 finer issues. That wonderful speech of his sire, 

 which all who knew him feared, has lost nothing in 

 the son, but is tremendously augmented, and cuts like 

 a Damascus sword, or crushes like a sledge-hammer. 

 The strongest and finest paternal traits have sur- 

 vived in him. Indeed, a little congenital rill seems 

 to have cotne all the way down from the old vikings. 

 Carlyle is not merely Scotch ; he is Norselandic. 

 There is a marked Scandinavian flavor in him ; a 

 touch, or more than a touch, of the rude, brawling, 

 bullying, hard-hitting, wrestling viking times. The 

 hammer of Thor antedates the hammer of his stone- 

 mason sire in him. He is Scotland, past and pres- 

 ent, moral and physical. John Knox and the Cov- 

 enanters survive in him : witness his religious zeal, 

 his depth and solemnity of conviction, his strugglings 

 and agonizings, his " conversion." Ossian survives 

 in him : behold that melancholy retrospect, that 

 gloom, that melodious wail. And especially, as I 

 have said, do his immediate ancestors survive in him, 

 his sturdy, toiling, fiery-tongued, clannish yeoman 

 progenitors : all are summed up here ; this is the 

 net result available for literature in the nineteenth 

 century. 



Carlyle's heart was always here in Scotland. A 

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