Authors, Scottish -- 19th century -- Biography; Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881; Historians -- Great Britain -- Biography
Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua,
Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.
Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready
to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one
Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees
was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her
on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the
Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something
weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few
minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'"
The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs
through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the
springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies,"
the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a
manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey,
and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the
melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the
two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to
the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite
voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair
sicht," was the reply.
We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's
practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a
good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving.
Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but
it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's
career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise
it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was
worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to
have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of
his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more
unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes
to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life
retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste
of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to
excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he
says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you
would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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