GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
much staring at them, or too much east wind, or through mere 
delicacy . . . the three bits of gooseberries, instead of growing 
larger, grew every day less, till they reached the smallness of pin- 
heads and dropped on the ground! I could have cried when the 
last one went!’’ She was more fortunate with the ivy that she 
brought from her mother’s house at Templans—ivy that still 
clothes the old brick wall at Cheyne Row. 
I fancy they employed no regular gardener during the years of 
their poverty. Carlyle himself kept the grass trim and tidy, and 
in 1837 he writes to John Sterling: ‘I have done nothing of 
late but dig earth and rubbish in the little garden so called.” 
“The little garden so called” was to Carlyle a refuge “‘ from the 
irrational, inarticulate spectacle of the streets”’; but he elsewhere 
says their tumult is becoming to him “a kind of marching music 
as he walked along, following his own thoughts, undisturbed by it.” 
Gardening, however, was better exercise and recreation for him than 
walking, insomuch as he could not both think and dig. And he 
hated London, which he designated as ‘‘ The Devil’s Own with 
its dirt and noises.” 
In an entry in his diary in the dog-days of 1838, he tells how heat 
and indigestion making sleep impossible, he went downstairs in his 
‘nightshirt to smoke in the “back yard.” ‘It was one of the 
beautifullest nights; the half-moon clear as silver looked out as 
from an eternity, and the great dawn was streaming up. I felt a 
remorse, a kind of shudder at the fuss I was making about a sleep- 
less night, about my sorrows at all, with a life so soon to be absorbed 
into the great mystery above and around me. Oh, let us be 
patient! Let us call to God with our silent hearts if we cannot 
with our tongues.” 
Once again, in a very hot August, many years later, unable 
to sleep, and Mrs. Carlyle away, he descended, at 8 a.m., to the 
garden, “‘ and smoked a cigar on a stool.”” The same soft mood 
again inspired him as on the earlier occasion: ‘‘ Have not seen so 
lovely, sad and grand a summer weather scene, for twenty years back. 
Trees stood all as if cast in bronze, not an aspen-leaf stirring ; sky 
was a silver mirror, getting yellowish in the north-east, and one 
big star, star of the morning, visible in the increasing light.” 
Earlier in that same year (1857) Mrs. Carlyle’s health had begun 
to fail, and he had induced her to go to Scotland. Writing to his 
262 
