Of Carlyle, too, she has an independent opinion. "It is a mystery to me why men so universally admire Carlyle; women do not, or, if there is occasionally one who does, she does not _like_ him. A woman's first thought about him would be, 'I pity his wife!' Do you remember what he said in answer to Mrs. Welsh's proposal to come and live with them and help support them? He said they could only live pleasantly together on the condition that she looked up to him, not he to her. Here is what he says: 'Now, think, Liebchen, whether your mother will consent to forget her riches and our poverty, and uncertain, more probably scanty, income, and consent in the spirit of Christian meekness to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her daughter's husband?' Now, isn't that insufferable conceit for you? To expect that a woman old enough to be his mother would lay aside her self-respect and individuality to accept him, a comparatively young and inexperienced man, as her master? The cheekiness of it! Here you have the key-note of his character,—'great I and little u.' "I have tried faithfully to like him, for it seemed as if the fault must be in me because I did not; I have labored wearily through nearly all his works, stumbling over his superlatives (why, he is an adjective factory; his pages look like the alphabet struck by a cyclone. You call it picturesqueness; I call it grotesqueness). But it was of no use; it makes me tired all over to think of it. All the time I said to myself, 'Oh, do stop your scolding; you are not so much better than the rest of us.' One is willing to be led to a higher life, but who wants to be pushed and cuffed along? How can people place him and our own Emerson, the dear guide and friend of so many of us, on the same level? It may be that the world had need of him, just as it needs lightning and rain and cold and pain, but must we _like_ these things?"[109:1] [109:1] My correspondent was Mrs. Beardslee of Manchester, Iowa. She died in October, 1885. VI EYE-BEAMS I A WEASEL AND HIS DEN