204 



AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



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 has no pa- 

 tience." 



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 before 

 me and noted his homely and rugged yet profound and 

 melancholy expression, I knew that their look was upon 

 him also, and that a greater than Ossian 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 Carlyle, or drawn such 

 fresh inspiration from that source. However we may 

 differ from him (and almost in self-defence one must 

 differ from a man of such intense and overweening 

 personality), it must yet be admitted that he habitually 

 speaks out of that primitive silence and solitude in 

 which only the heroic soul dwells. Certainly not in 

 contemporary British literature 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 Eng- 

 land and Wales, and stringing upon my thread a few of 

 the famous places, as Oxford, Stratford, Warwick, Bir- 

 mingham, Chester, and taking a last look of the be- 



