A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 

 I. 



WHILE in London I took a bright Sunday after- 

 noon to visit Chelsea, and walk along Cheyne Row 

 and look upon the house in which Carlyle passed 

 nearly fifty years of his life and in which he died. 

 Many times I paced to and fro. I had been there 

 eleven years before, but it was on a dark, rainy night, 

 and I had brought away no image of the street or 

 house. The place now had a more humble and neg- 

 lected look than I expected to see ; nothing that sug- 

 gested it had ever been the abode of the foremost 

 literary man of his time, but rather the home of plain, 

 obscure persons of little means. One would have 

 thought that the long residence there of such a man 

 as Carlyle would have enhanced the value of real 

 estate for many squares around, and drawn men of 

 wealth and genius to that part of the city. The Car- 

 lyle house was unoccupied, and with its closed shut- 

 ters, and little pools of black sooty water standing in 

 the brick area in front of the basement windows, 

 looked dead and deserted indeed. But the house it- 

 self, though nearly two hundred years old, showed no 



