Thomas Carlyle is a
Scotchman, born about fifty years ago, “at
Ecclefechan,
Annandale,”
according to one authority.
“His parents ‘good farmer people,’ his father an elder in
the Secession
church there, and a man of strong native sense, whose words were said to
‘nail a subject to the wall.’” We also hear of his
“excellent mother,” still alive, and of “her fine old
covenanting accents, converting with his transcendental tones.” He
seems to have gone to school at
Annan, on the shore of the
Solway Firth, and
there, as he himself writes, “heard of famed professors, of high
matters classical, mathematical, a whole Wonderland of Knowledge,” from
Edward Irving, then
a young man “fresh from Edinburgh, with college prizes, … come
to see our schoolmaster, who had also been his.” From this place, they
say, you can look over into Wordsworth’s
country. Here first he may have become acquainted with Nature, with woods,
such as are there, and rivers and brooks, some of whose names we have heard,
and the last lapses of Atlantic billows. He got some of his education, too,
more or less liberal, out of the
University of
Edinburgh, where, according to the same authority, he had to
“support himself,” partly by “private tuition, translations
for the booksellers,
etc.,” and
afterward, as we are glad to hear, “taught an academy in
Dysart, at the
same time that Irving was teaching in
Kirkaldy,” the
usual middle passage of a literary life. He was destined for the Church, but
not by the powers that rule man’s life; made his literary
début in
Fraser’s
Magazine, long ago; read here and there in English and French, with more
or less profit, we may suppose, such of us at least as are not particularly
informed, and at length found some words which spoke to his condition in the
German language, and set himself earnestly to unravel that mystery —
with what success many readers know.
After his marriage he “resided partly at
Comely Bank,
Edinburgh; and
for a year or two at
Craigenputtock, a
wild and solitary farmhouse in the upper part of
Dumfriesshire,”
at which last place, amid barren heather hills, he was visited by our
countryman,
Emerson. With
Emerson he still corresponds. He was early intimate with Edward Irving, and
continued to be his friend until the latter’s death. Concerning this
“freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul,” and Carlyle’s
relation to him, those whom it concerns will do well to consult
a notice of
his death in Fraser’s Magazine for 1835, reprinted in the
Miscellanies. He also corresponded with
Goethe.
Latterly, we hear, the poet
Sterling
was his only intimate acquaintance in England.
He has spent the last quarter of his life in London, writing books; has the
fame, as all readers know, of having made England acquainted with Germany, in
late years, and done much else that is novel and remarkable in literature. He
especially is the literary man of those parts.
