ength had his way
and persuaded his wife to remove to Craigenputtock. It was in the
loneliness of the moors that Carlyle was to come to his full stature and
to develop his astonishing genius.

Craigenputtock was a farm belonging to his wife's family, lying seventy
feet above the sea, sixteen miles from Dumfries, among desolate moors
and bogs, and fully six miles from the nearest village. 'The house is
gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands with the scanty fields attached as
an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed either by
grace or grandeur, mere undulating hills of grass and heather with peat
bogs in the hollows between them.' So Froude describes the home where
the Carlyles were to spend six years, the wife in domestic labours, in
solitude, in growing ill-health, the husband in omnivorous reading, in
digesting the knowledge that he gathered, in transmuting it and marking
it with the peculiar stamp of his genius. There was no true
companionship over the work. As the moorland gave the fresh air and
stillness required, so the wife might nourish the physical frame with
wholesome digestible food and save him from external cares; the rest
must be done by lonely communing with himself. He needed no Fleet Street
taverns or literary salons to encourage him. Goethe, with whom he
exchanged letters and compliments at times, said with rare insight that
he 'had in himself an originating principle of conviction, out of which
he could develop the force that lay in him unassisted by other men'.

Few were the interruptions from without. His fame was not yet
established. In any case pilgrims would have to undertake a very rough
journey, and the fashion of such pilgrimages had hardly begun. But in
1833 from distant America came one disciple, afterwards to be known as
the famous author Ralph Waldo Emerson; and he has left us in his
_English Traits_ a vivid record of his impression of two or three famous
men of letters whom he saw. He describes Carlyle as 'tall and gaunt,
with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary
powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent
with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming
humour, which floated everything he looked upon'.[2]

[Note 2: Emerson, _English Traits_, 'World's Classics' edition, p.
8.]

Much of his time was given to reading about the French Revolution, which
was to be the subject of his greatest literary tri