ttentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away,
wife away for ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like
a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of
these good people, their well-saved coarse old clothes, tailed
waistcoats down to mid-thigh--all this I occasionally see as with eyes
sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon
it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the
drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them.' And what a
glimpse we have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting
religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David Hope, the farmer
who refused to postpone family worship in order to take in his grain.
David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with the
words: 'Such a raging wind risen will drive the stooks into the sea if
let alone.' 'Wind!' answered David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has
been appointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' Far away from the
simple Covenanting creed of his father and mother Carlyle wandered, but
to the last the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained vivid
with him, though fed from quite other sources than the Bible and the
_Shorter Catechism_.

Much has been said of Carlyle's father, but it is highly probable that
to his mother he owed most during his early years. The temperament of
the Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like James Carlyle
were essentially stern, self-centred, unemotional. Fighting like the
Jews, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they had no time
for cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to go to the
stake on behalf of religious liberty, they exercised a repressive, not
to say despotic, influence in their own households. With them education
meant not the unfolding of the individual powers of the children, but
the ruthless crushing of them into a theological mould. Religion in such
an atmosphere became loveless rather than lovely, and might have had
serious influences of a reactionary nature but for the caressing
tenderness of the mother. With a heart which overflowed the ordinary
theological boundaries, the mother in many sweet and hidden ways
supplied the emotional element, which had been crushed out of the father
by a narrow conception of life and duty. Carlyle's experience may be
judged from his references to his parents. He always speaks of his
fath