her death, and a right honouring of her memory. But alas
all is yet _frozen_ within me; even as it is without me at present, and
I have made little or no way. God be helpful to me! I myself am very
weak, confused, fatigued, entangled in poor _worldlinesses_ too.
Newspaper paragraphs, even as this sacred and peculiar thing, are not
indifferent to me. Weak soul! and I am fifty-eight years old, and the
tasks I have on hand, Frederick, &c., are most ungainly, incongruous
with my mood--and the night cometh, for me too is not distant, which for
her is come. I must try, I must try. Poor brother Jack! Will he do his
Dante now? For him also I am sad; and surely he has deserved gratitude
in these last years from us all.'[28]

When he returned to London, Carlyle lived in strict seclusion, making
repeated efforts at work on what he called 'the unexecutable book,'
_Frederick_. In the spring of 1854, tidings reached Carlyle of the death
of Professor Wilson. Between them there had never been any cordial
relation, says Froude. 'They had met in Edinburgh in the old days; on
Carlyle's part there had been no backwardness, and Wilson was not
unconscious of Carlyle's extraordinary powers. But he had been shy of
Carlyle, and Carlyle had resented it, and now this April the news came
that Wilson was gone, and Carlyle had to write his epitaph. 'I knew his
figure well,' wrote Carlyle in his journal on April 29; 'remember well
first seeing him in Princes Street on a bright April afternoon--probably
1814--exactly forty years ago.... A tall ruddy figure, with plenteous
blonde hair, with bright blue eyes, fixed, as if in haste towards some
distant object, strode rapidly along, clearing the press to the left of
us, close by the railings, near where Blackwood's shop now is. Westward
he in haste; we slowly eastward. Campbell whispered me, "That is Wilson
of the _Isle of Palms_," which poem I had not read, being then quite
mathematical, scientific, &c., for extraneous reasons, as I now see them
to have been. The broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man struck me;
his flashing eye, copious, dishevelled head of hair, and rapid,
unconcerned progress, like that of a plough through stubble. I really
liked him, but only from the distance, and thought no more of him. It
must have been fourteen years later before I once saw his figure again,
and began to have some distant straggling acquaintance of a personal
kind with him. Glad could I have been to be better a