66 IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY. 



vague, yearning homesickness seemed ever to possess 

 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 cen- 

 tre, 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, gen- 

 eration upon generation, had toiled and wrought here 

 amid the lonely moors, had wrestled with poverty and 

 privation, had wrung the earth for a scanty subsis- 

 tence, till they had become identified with the soil, 

 kindred with it. How strong the family ties had 

 grown in the struggle ; how the sentiment of home 

 was fostered ! Then the Carlyles were men who lav- 

 ished 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 

 Carlyle, 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 distinguished descendant. It gave him 



