On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John set off for London. On the Wednesday he was on his way to Haddington with the remains, his brother and John Forster accompanying him. At 1 P.M. on Thursday the funeral took place. 'In the nave of the old Abbey Kirk,' wrote her disconsolate husband, 'long a ruin, now being saved from further decay, with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine on me more.' When Mr Conway saw him on his return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, 'Whatever triumph there may have been in that now so darkly overcast day, was indeed _hers_. Long, long years ago, she took her place by the side of a poor man of humblest condition, against all other provisions for her, undertook to share his lot for weal or woe; and in that office what she has been to him and done for him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now only in the knowledge of one man, and will presently be finally hid in his grave.' As he touchingly expressed it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the 'light of his life' had assuredly 'gone out.' Universal sympathy was felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very much affected by 'a delicate, graceful, and even affectionate' message from the Queen, conveyed by Lady Augusta Stanley through his brother John. One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks of her: 'Her intellect was as clear and incisive as his, yet altogether womanly in character; her heart was as truthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a wife in the noblest sense of that sacred name. She had a gift of literary expression as unique as his; as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and need; as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and folly; as vivid powers of description and illustration; and also, it must be confessed, when the spirit of mockery was strong upon her, as keen an edge to her flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of the conventional proprieties. But she was no literary hermaphrodite. She never intellectually strode forth before the world upon masculine stilts; nor, in private life, did she frowardly push to the front, in the vanity of showing she was as clever and considerable as her husband. She longed, with a true woman's longing heart, to be appreciated by him, and by those she loved; and, for her, all extraneous applause might whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king in literature, so might she have been a queen. Her influence with him for good cannot be questioned by any one having eyes to discern. And if she sacrificed her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to make his work possible for him, who shall say she did not choose the nobler and better part?'[36]