cultivate literature with diligence, and in our own peculiar way. We wish a joyful growth to the roses and flowers of our garden; we hope for health and peaceful thoughts to further our aims. The roses, indeed, are still in part to be planted, but they blossom already in anticipation.

"Two ponies, which carry us everywhere, and the mountain air, are the best medicines for weak nerves. This daily exercise, to which I am much devoted, is my only dissipation; for this nook of ours is the loneliest in Britain-six miles removed from everyone who in any case might visit me. Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of Saint Pierre.

"My town friends, indeed, ascribe my sojourn here to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good result. But I came hither solely with the design to simplify my way of life, and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself. This bit of earth is our own; here we can live, write, and think, as best pleases ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the monarch of Literature.

"Nor is the solitude of such great importance; for a stage coach takes us speedily to Edinburgh, which we look upon as our British Weimar. And have I not, too, at this moment,

piled upon the table of my little library, a whole cartload of French, German, American, and English journals and periodicals,-whatever may be their worth?

Of antiquarian studies, too, there is no lack. From some of our heights I can descry, about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola and his Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I was born, and there both father and mother still live to love me. And so one must let time work. Yet whither am I tending? let me confess to you, I am uncertain about my future literary activity, and would gladly learn your opinion respecting it; at least, pray write to me again and speedily, that I may ever feel myself united to you.

"The only piece of any importance that I have written since I came here is an essay on Burns. Perhaps you never heard of him, and yet he was a man of the most decided genius; but born in the lowest rank of peasant life, and through the entanglements of his peculiar position, was at last mournfully wrecked, so that what he effected is comparatively unimportant. He died in the middle of his career, in the year 1796.

"We English, especially we Scotch, love Burns more than any poet that has lived for centuries. I have often been struck by the fact

that he was born a few months before Schiller, in the year 1759, and that neither of them ever heard the other's name. They shone like stars in opposite hemispheres, or if you will, the thick mist of earth intercepted their reciprocal light."

Letter to

The now famous essay on Burns here alluded to was Carlyle's third contribution to the Edinburgh Review, where it appeared in December 1828. In the same month was written the following letter to Thomas De Quincey, in which that gifted and eccentric being is treated in a more friendly and respectful spirit than Thomas De that accorded to his memory in Quincey. Carlyle's posthumous Reminiscences. We shall give the letter entire, on account of its containing another graphic record of the life at Craigenputtoch, hardly less interesting than that quoted above. It is also a charming example of the earlier epistolary style of the writer.

"MY DEAR SIR,

66

Craigenputtoch,

"December 11th, 1828.

"Having the opportunity of a frank, I

cannot resist the temptation to send you a few lines, were it only to signify that two well-wishers of yours are still alive in these remote moors, and often

To Thomas

De Quincey.

thinking of you with the old friendly feelings. My wife encourages me in this innocent purpose; she has learned lately that you were inquiring for her of some female friend; nay, promising to visit us here-a fact of the most interesting sort to both of us. I am to say, therefore, that your presence at this fireside will diffuse no ordinary gladness over all members of the household; that our warmest welcome, and such solacements as even the desert does not refuse, are at any time and at all times in store for one we love so well. Neither is this expedition so impracticable. We lie but a short way out of your direct route to Westmoreland; communicate by gravelled roads with Dumfries and other places in the habitable globe. Were you to warn us of your approach, it might all be made easy enough. And then such a treat it would be to hear the sound of philosophy and literature in the hitherto quite savage wolds, where since the creation of the world no such music, scarcely even articulate speech, had been uttered or dreamed of! Come, therefore, come and see us; for we often long after you. Nay, I can promise, too, that we are almost a unique sight in the British Empire; such a quantity of German periodicals and mystic speculation embosomed in plain Scottish Peat-moor being

nowhere else that I know of to be met with. In idle hours we sometimes project founding a sort of colony here, to be called the 'Misanthropic Society'; the settlers all to be men of a certain philosophic depth, and intensely sensible of the present state of literature; each to have his own cottage, encircled with roses or thistles as he might prefer; a library and pantry within, and huge stack of turf-fuel without; fenced off from his neighbours by fir woods, and, when he pleased, by cast-metal railing, so that each might feel himself strictly an individual, and free as a son of the wilderness; but the whole settlement to meet weekly over coffee, and there unite in their Miserere, or what were better, hurl forth their defiance, pity, expostulation, over the whole universe, civil, literary, and religious. I reckon this place a much fitter site for such an establishment than your Lake Country-a region abounding in natural beauty, but blown on by coach-horns, betrodden by picturesque tourists, and otherwise exceedingly desecrated by too frequent resort; whereas here, though still in communication with the manufacturing world, we have a solitude altogether Druidicalgrim hills tenanted chiefly by the wild grouse, tarns and brooks that have soaked and slumbered unmolested since the Deluge of Noah.