EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL.

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a kind of sacred defiance, trotzend das Schicksal. It has become clear to me that I have honestly more force and faculty in me than belongs to the most I see. Also it was always clear that no honestly exerted force can be utterly lost. Were it long years after I am dead, in regions far distant from this, under names far different from thine, the seed thou sowest will spring. The great difficulty is to keep oneself in right balance, not despondent, not exasperated, defiant, free and clear. Oh for faith! Food and raiment thou hast never lacked yet and shalt not.

Nevertheless it is now some three-and-twenty months since I have earned one penny by the craft of literature. Be this recorded as a fact and document for the literary history of this time. I have been ready to work, I am abler than ever to work, know no fault I have committed; and yet so it stands. To ask able editors to employ you will not improve but worsen matters. You are like a spinster waiting to be married. I have some serious thoughts of quitting this 'Periodical' craft one good time for all. It is not synonymous with a life of wisdom. When want is approaching, one must have done with whims. If literature will refuse me both bread and a stomach to digest bread, then surely the case is growing clear.

Voyons!
Roebuck

Emerson from America invites me in the most enthusiastic terms to come thither and lecture. I thank him, and at least ask explanatory light. . . . Thanks to thrift and my good Scotch wife, we can hold out many months yet. Met Radicals, &c., at Mrs. Buller's a week ago. Robespierre was there, an acrid, sandy, barren character, dissonant-speaking, dogmatic, trivial, with a singular exasperation; restlessness as of diseased vanity written over his face when you come near it. I do not think him even equal to Robespierre, nor is it likely that a game of that sort will be played so soon again. Aus dem wird wenig. Sir William Molesworth, with the air of a good roystering schoolboy, pleased me considerably more. A man of rank can still do this, forget his rank wholly, and be the sooner esteemed for having the mind equal to doing that.

February 8, 1835.-Vernal weather of all kinds, soft and hard, moist western and clear north-eastern, to me most memorative. Old days at Mainhill, Hoddam Hill, and earlier, come vividly back full of sad beauty which, while passing, they had not. Why is the past so beautiful? The element of fear is withdrawn from it for one thing. That is all safe, while the present and future are all so dangerous. 'Moonlight of memory' a poetic phrase of Richter's. Also The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul.' There are yet few days in which I do not meet on the streets some face that recalls my sister Margaret's, and reminds me that she is not suffering, but silent, asleep, in the Ecclefechan kirkyard; her life, her self, where God willed. What a miracle is all existence! Last night at Taylor's by myself; I, against my will, the main talker; learned nothing, enjoyed little; the tribes of Westminster, all on the late streets, making their Saturday markets, quite a new scene to me.

A

February 26, 1835.-Went last night, in wet bad weather, to Taylor's to meet Southey, who received me kindly. lean, grey, whiteheaded man of dusky complexion, unexpectedly tall when he rises and still leaner then-the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge bush of white grey hair on high crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen--a well-read, honest, limited (straitlaced even) kindly-hearted, most irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great purpose on either side, I imagine, to meet again. Southey believes in the Church of England. This is notable: notable and honourable that he has made such belief serve him so well.

Letter from Alick yesterday with a postscript from my mother. Jack also has written to me. Properly at this time there is nothing comfortable to me in my existence but the getting on with that book and the love of some beloved ones mostly far from me.

Allein und abgetrennt von aller Freude! I repeated this morning. Yet thou canst write. Write then and complain. of nothing—defy all things. The book announced yesterday.

HIS BROTHER JOHN.

21

Would that I were further on with it! I ought to be done when Jack appoints to arrive, which I hope he will soon. He is one of my chief comforts. To work at the Fête des Piques.

'Jack' and Alick' were Carlyle's two brothers, John and Alexander. Alexander, who had been his companion at Craigenputtock, was struggling, not very successfully, with a farm near Lockerbie. John, who had been so long an object of expense and anxiety, was now, thanks to Jeffrey, in easy circumstances, living as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and with. a handsome income which he was eager to share with his brother, as his brother had before shared with him his own narrow earnings and his moorland home. The contest of generosity was a very pretty one. Carlyle could never accept these offers, so independent and proud he was, and yet he reproached himself sometimes for having denied John so great a pleasure. John was the one person from whom he could have accepted an obligation, and if the worst came he had resolved that John should help him. But the occasion had not arrived yet, and the brothers continued to correspond with perfect unreserve and the old effusiveness of detail.

To John Carlyle.

Chelsea: January 12, 1835.

Your letters, my dear Jack, are always a great comfort to me. With your brotherly affection and true-heartedness, you are one of the best possessions I have. . . . Be certain I will share if need be. It were poor pride to resolve otherwise. With you alone of men such a thing were possible. Nay, it is to you only I can so much as complain. My true Annandalians would but in vain afflict themselves with my cares. Other heart there is none in the world that would even very

honestly do that. My friends here admit cheerfully that I am a very heroic man, that must understand the art, unknown to them, of living upon nothing. Mill, I think, alone of them, would make any great effort to help me. . . As to heroism (bless the mark!), I think often of the old rhyme :

There was a piper had a cow,

And he had naught to give her ;
He took his pipes and played a spring,
And bade the cow consider.
The cow considered wi' hersel'

That piping ne'er would fill her;

'Gie me a peck o' oaten strae,

And sell your wind for siller.'

In a word, my prospects here are not sensibly brightening; if it be not in this, that the longer I live among this people, the deeper grows my feeling (not a vain one-a sad one) of natural superiority over them; of being able (were the tools in my hand) to do a hundred things better than the hundred I see paid for doing them. In bright days I say it is impossible, but I must by-and-by strike into something. In dark days I say, 'and suppose nothing?' My sentiment is a kind of sacred defiance of the whole matter.

In this humour I write my book, without hope of it, except of being done with it, properly beginning to as good as feel that literature has gone mad in this country, and will not yield food to any honest cultivator of it. For example: if this book ever prospers, the issue will be applications in mad superabundance from able editors to write articles for them (with my heart's blood, as you sympathetically say) for perhaps six months-then a total cessation. Though I myself were able to write articles for ever, that is nothing. They are off after any new thing,' and you stand wondering alone on the beach. As to 'fame' again, and 'distinguished' men, I declare to thee, Jack, a distinguished man' (but above all things a distinguished woman) is a character I had rather not see; and fame' with such miserable cobwebs as gain it most, and are burnt up by it, is heartily worth nothing to me.

LITERATURE AS A PROFESSION.

23

Nay, sometimes, with pious thought, I feel it a mercy that I have it not. Who knows whether it would not calcine me too-drive me, too, mad? Literature does not invite me. Sometimes I say to myself, Surely, friend, Providence, if ever it did warn, warns thee to have done with literature, which will never yield thee bread, nor stomach to digest bread.

Mrs. Carlyle adds a postscript:

My dear Brother,-Your affectionate letter is the greatest comfort we have had this new year. Otherwise it has been a rather detestable one. I said to Carlyle some weeks ago, 'I am resolved to make a little fun this Christmas, for our Christmases for a long while back have been so doleful.' 'I shall be particularly delighted,' said he, ‘if you can realise any fun.' Well, the next morning, at breakfast, my maid poured a quantity of boiling water on my foot, in consequence of which, and I think also of improper applications, I have been confined to the house five weeks, the most of that time indebed to Carlyle for carrying me out of one room into another.

Ms.

wrote me a sentimental effusion on the death of Edvard Irving, threatening as heretofore to come and see me, but has not been yet, nor will not. The only pity is that she will not let the matter lie quite dormant.

There is a Mrs. X. whom I could really love, if it were safe and she was willing; but she is a dangerous-looking woman, and no useful relation can spring up between us. In short, my dear doctor, I am hardly better off for society thai at Craig-o-putta: not so well off as when you were there waking with me and reading Ariosto.

Hard as he was working, Carlyle never ceased to looi about for any kind of employment outside literature. His circumstances made it a duty for him to try, vain as every effort proved; and one scheme after another rises and fades in his correspondence.