You may imagine him living in
altogether a retired and simple way, with small family, in a quiet part of
London, called
Chelsea, a
little out of the din of commerce, in “Cheyne Row,” there, not
far from the
“Chelsea
Hospital.” “A little past this, and an old ivy-clad church,
with its buried generations lying around it,” writes one traveler,
“you come to an antique street running at right angles with the Thames,
and, a few steps from the river, you find Carlyle’s name on the
door.” “A Scotch lass ushers you into the second story front
chamber, which is the spacious workshop of the world maker.” Here he
sits a long time together, with many books and papers about him; many new
books, we have been told, on the upper shelves, uncut, with the
“author’s respects” in them; in late months, with many
manuscripts in an old English hand, and innumerable pamphlets, from the
public libraries, relating to the
Cromwellian
period; now, perhaps, looking out into the street on brick and pavement, for a
change, and now upon some rod of grass ground in the rear; or, perchance, he
steps over to the
British Museum, and
makes that his studio for the time. This is the fore part of the day; that is
the way with literary men commonly; and then in the afternoon, we presume, he
takes a short run of a mile or so through the suburbs out into the country;
we think he would run that way, though so short a trip might not take him to
very sylvan or rustic places. In the meanwhile, people are calling to
see him, from various quarters, few very worthy of being
seen by him; “distinguished travelers from America,” not
a few; to all and sundry of whom he gives freely of his yet unwritten rich
and flashing soliloquy, in exchange for whatever they may have to offer;
speaking his English, as they say, with a “broad Scotch accent,”
talking, to their astonishment and to ours, very much as he writes, a sort of
Carlylese, his discourse
“coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.”
He goes to Scotland sometimes, to visit his native heath-clad hills, having
some interest still in the earth there; such names as Craigenputtock and
Ecclefechan, which we have already quoted, stand for habitable places there
to him; or he rides to the seacoast of England in his vacations, upon his
horse Yankee, bought by the sale of his books here, as we have been told.
How, after all, he gets his living; what proportion of his daily bread he
earns by day-labor or job-work with his pen, what he inherits, what steals
— questions whose answers are so significant, and not to be omitted in
his biography — we, alas! are unable to answer here. It may be worth
the while to state that he is not a
Reformer in our sense of the term
— eats, drinks, and sleeps, thinks and believes, professes and
practices, not according to the New England standard, nor to the Old English
wholly. Nevertheless, we are told that he is a sort of lion in certain
quarters there,
“an amicable centre for men of the most opposite opinions,”
and
“listened to as an oracle,”
“smoking his perpetual pipe.”
A rather tall, gaunt figure, with intent face, dark hair and complexion, and
the air of a student; not altogether well in body, from sitting too long in
his workhouse — he, born in
the Border Country
and descended from
moss-troopers, it may
be.
