FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 225 



convert him or change his convictions upon subjects 

 to which he has devoted a life-time of profound 

 thought and meditation. With such persons he hits 

 no patience." 



Carlyle had just returned from Scotland, where he 

 had spent the summer. The Scotch hills and mount- 

 ains, 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 venerable man be- 

 fore me and noted his homely and rugged yet pro- 

 found and melancholy expression, I knew that their 

 look was upon him also, and that a greater than Os- 

 sian 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 Car- 

 lyle, 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 admit- 

 ted that lie habitually speaks out of that primitive 

 silence and solitude in which only the heroic soul 

 dwells. Certainly not in contemporary British lit- 

 erature 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, War- 

 wick, Birmingham, Chester, and taking a last look of 

 15 



