How significant is this phrase,--"unable to trust the general action of a thought." This saving faith in the power of just thought Carlyle, the thinker, had not. With a reverence, then, not blind, but discriminating, Margaret approached this luminous mind, and saw and heard its possessor thus:-- "Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse, only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.... Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness or self-love: it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons. "For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd.... He puts out his chin sometimes till it looks like the beak of a bird; and his eyes flash bright, instinctive meanings, like Jove's bird. Yet he is not calm and grand enough for the eagle: he is more like the falcon, and yet not of gentle blood enough for that either.... I cannot speak more nor wiselier of him now; nor needs it. His works are true to blame and praise him,--the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than to legislate for good." In a letter to Mr. Emerson, Margaret gives some account of her visits at the Carlyle mansion. The second of these was on the occasion of a dinner-party, at which she met "a witty, French, flippant sort of a man, author of a History of Philosophy, and now writing a life of Goethe," presumably George Lewes. Margaret acknowledges that he told stories admirably, and that his occasional interruptions of Carlyle's persistent monologue were welcome. Of this, her summary is too interesting to be omitted here:-- "For a couple of hours he was talking about poetry, and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind. Tennyson wrote in verse because the schoolmasters had taught him that it was great to do so; and had thus, unfortunately, been turned from the true path for a man. Burns had, in like manner, been turned from his vocation. Shakespeare had not had the good sense to see that it would have been better to write straight on in prose; and such nonsense which, though amusing enough at first, he ran to death after a while.... The latter part of the evening, however, he paid us for this by a series of sketches, in his finest style of railing and raillery, of modern French literature. All were depreciating except that of Béranger. Of him he spoke with perfect justice, because with hearty sympathy."