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"I hear."

almost any woman he had ever spoken | hours. Mr. Duncan scarcely thought she
with before, yet with long curls fastened heard what he said, but when she noticed
back with schoolgirl side-combs, and his pause, she said promptly : —
wearing a rich and elaborate robe, made
in the fashion which had suited young
maidens sixty years before. But it was
the face itself which was so awful. For
it, too, was a girl's face, withered and
faded
- a very mummy of girlhood the
face as of a spirit cursed with imperisha-
ble union with an ever-perishing body-
not immortal life but immortal death.

It was not often that young Mr. Duncan lost his presence of mind. But for a moment be did so. His ever ready inspiration failed him. They stood gazing at each other.

"Ah, you look at me," she said, in a thin, high, but not unmusical voice. "You should not wonder at anything strange, for you have sent me a strange message. Have you come from a tomb to a tomb? But you are a living man, I know, though you have the look of one

"These people want to say to you," he resumed, "Is it kind to them to let these shut-up houses go to ruin in this dreadful way?" They don't know you: they don't know to whom these houses belong. But one or two of them have got an idea that you know all about it, and they want you to deliver this, their message, to the owner."

"I am the owner myself," she said. "Oh, I am so glad!" exclaimed Mr. Duncan. "For now I know the owner herself has consented to receive the message and I fancy she will hear me out, and forgive me for taking courage to come and speak to her."

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Again she said, mechanically, "I hear." "Don't you think all we have is given us to keep-and will be required of us again, with an account of the use to which we have put it?" he asked. "You reShe broke off suddenly, and her momen-member how poorly that man fared who tary flash of excitement subsided into a dull, commonplace manner.

who

"Sit down, young man," she said. "I don't see many visitors, and I forget my manners. Sit down and say what you have to say."

He had bad time to recover his selfpossession, and he glanced at the other figure by the fire. If a third party was to be present at the carrying out of his wild dream, he wanted to know from the outset to what the influence of that third party was likely to tend.

But Miss Turner was watching him narrowly, and she detected the glance. "You need not think about her," she said. "You and I are alone. Hannah can neither see, nor hear, nor speak now: she cannot do anything: she cannot even die."

Certainly Hannah was as motionless as the grim busts on the wall. Mr. Duncan looked round at them a little forlornly. "Well?" said Miss Turner interrogatively.

I have a message for you from hundreds and hundreds of people," said the young man turning towards her. He did not fall into a preaching tone. He spoke as if he had said he had a message from

a cousin.

But she did not respond. A shade of something could it be disappointment - passed over her face. She did not yield to it: she sat looking straight before her: he could imagine her sitting so for

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kept his talent folded up. Now these houses such beautiful houses, too!are not even folded up and kept as they were at the beginning. They get worse every day. I say nothing about the money that is wasted through their condition, though I think some little starving children and some helpless old people whom I saw on my walk here might have sent you a message about that. But, my dear madam, would you like to live opposite these houses yourself? "

"It would not matter to me," she said, glancing at her own blinded casements. But the sense of beauty, dying hard within the woman, was vindicated by two huge nettle geraniums which spread their pale leaves to catch all they could of the obscured sunlight.

"Perhaps you are right concerning that, now," he admitted, with an infinite tenderness in his tone. "But, Miss Turner, like all of us, you have not only a present, but a past. Were there never days in your life when you would not have liked those terrible walls to make part of their scenery?"

He unconsciously repeated Mr. Lane's phrase. He paused again, and this time the dry, mechanical "I hear" did not urge him on. The awfully set features were quivering a little.

"You cannot imagine what dreadful ideas these houses put into people's heads," he said. 'Up in St. Mitre's parish, they have invented two or three mur

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He could not tell how far she listened to him, but she spoke when he paused.

"Offended!" she exclaimed. "No, certainly not. I only wish you had come sixty years ago," she added presently.

Mr. Duncan felt inclined to say that if he had been his own grandfather he might have done so. Not in levity: but he was à man of light heart and cheery temperament.

"Do you suppose I deliberately planned to leave my houses as they are or to live as I do?" she asked. If you do, you know little of the world."

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Mr. Duncan said nothing. He felt that the stagnant waters were stirring beneath, arousing memories and regrets of which he knew nothing, and he was too wise to disturb their influence.

"A ghost next door! How did they invent that, I wonder? Ah, I think I know. I remember one night when a crowd gathered on the pavement in front of the house. We supposed they had "Murders!" she said presently, no heard old Hannah scraping up coals," longer in that wistful tone of mockery. and as she said "old Hannah". a motion" Murders! Yes; one, two, three young of her head indicated the passive figure by the hearth. "There is a way from this house into the cellar of the house next door; and we had always used that cellar for coals."

Mr. Duncan looked at her as she paused.

women slowly, slowly murdered. God only knows by whom or by what! They were all stabbed to the heart, and then left stunned and bleeding on the world's highway, to creep away from being pelted and stoned, as the world always stones and pelts maimed creatures; and there was never a hand or a voice lifted up to call them back never a healing touch or a

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"And so that was a ghost, was it?" she went on, presently, with a change of voice, and a strange touch of bitter, youth-healing word given to bind the torn flesh ful scornfulness, as much out of place as over the wrung nerves! Is this my voice all the rest of herself and her manner. I hear talking?" she asked fiercely, with "Dear me! It seems I can gauge the a return of the excitement she had manidepth of human folly well, for I said at fested on Mr. Duncan's first entrance. the time that would make a fine ghost. "I remember I used to talk like this at But I never knew about the reported first. No; not at first-a little after the murders. The people must have known first. I feel as if I had been asleep, and better than that," she added impatiently. had wakened; as if I had gone to sleep very, very hungry, and had woke again to still find no bread. I did not want to wake till I was dead!" she wailed pitifully. “You had no right to wake me! You little know what you did when you sent in that last message, asking if I hadn't a friend in another world."

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They knew nothing, don't you see? said Mr. Duncan gently, "and weeds always grow in waste land. You can judge what a terrible effect these houses must have had, when they made decent, respectable people fancy such things without any foundation whatever."

She laughed a bitter laugh. "I won't say 'without any foundation,' but certainly without any foundation such minds could appreciate. I think there have been murders, sir," she added, drawing a long breath; "two murders; three, I ought to say. Perhaps there will be four. Slow, slow murders. Some of us are not dead yet!"

The figure by the fireside gave a low, dreadful moan. Mr. Duncan started. "She does not hear anything," said Miss Turner coolly. "That groan happened to come in by chance."

"But you will tell me that you are not offended by my temerity in approaching you," pleaded Mr. Duncan meekly.

Mr. Duncan sat in silence, but she looked in his face and went on.

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"I'm so old and so odd that I suppose it is no wonder if my mind is shaky. And so, though of course I knew better, I almost felt as if some miracle was going to happen as if one of my dead was coming back to life. I thought it might be all a dream the girl coming in and going out, repeating the words you said; and I thought I would let it go on, and see what the end would be. There are two graves in my life and I've never seen either of them in the earth. Yes, there's a third grave - poor Agatha'sbut that's nothing. She was buried, like me, before she died, and the second sort.

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of grave doesn't matter. Fancy goes a long way, I used to be told when I was a girl, and I knew it must be fancy if either of my dead came back. But it's something to get a moment of pleasant fancy after living, living, living, for sixty years with fancies of the other sort. But when I saw you, I knew you were not a fancy; and yet

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She turned to him suddenly, and a strange, soft, womanly light came into the bard, dry old eyes.

"God bless you! " she said gently. "If people would always walk, like you, into earth's dark places, they'd find nothing there but some shunned, blinded fellow-creature, groping to get out. I will tell you my history," she added, gazing at him with a yearning look, as though he reminded her of some one in the dead past. "You will have patience with me, I know - and you will have pity!"

tells us, "that he was afterwards unconscious of what he had done, and when ten years later I found the Irving MS. and asked him about it, he did not know to what I was alluding."

In such a state of disturbance if a man's mind can be saved, it must be by occupation; and if any occupation is possible, it will be that which has been habitual. The habit of Carlyle's mind was to look into the past, to describe what he saw there, to give it shape and color in language, and to write about it; and this was the resource to which he betook bimself.

Mr. Froude avows frankly enough his undivided responsibility for the publication of what had been so written.* He avows his responsibility; but, to judge by what he has done, with no adequate sense of what it amounts to. "The reader has here before him," he says, " Mr. Carlyle's own handiwork, but without his last touches, not edited by himself, not corrected by himself, perhaps most of it not intended for publication." Just so; and the reader as he reads, if he feels as I do, will feel himself to be overhearing a soliloquy; and not the less a soliloquy beTHE publication of Carlyle's "Reminis- cause the diction is now and then strained cences, with all, or, if not all, far too and overwrought. It is for the most part much, of what is said in them of his less so than was usual with him; and friends and acquaintances, has thrown a men who have made the moulding of sad element of bitterness into the out-language the business of their lives may burst of admiration and sorrow which naturally fall into the practice in soliloquy followed upon his death. It could not be from the force of habit. otherwise, and the upas is not the tree that should be planted on the grave of a great man.

From The Nineteenth Century. SIR HENRY TAYLOR ON CARLYLE'S "REMINISCENCES." *

I knew him for, I think, nearly fifty years, and what I know best is that he was not easily to be understood. One thing about him it is almost needless to say that he was like nobody else. The world must judge men by its experience; and when the guidance of experience is wanting, the world is in a way to misjudge. It has had no experience whatever of men like Carlyle; and the circumstances under which most of these "Reminiscences were written may have made them even more liable to be misunderstood than, under any ordinary condi. tions, Carlyle himself would be.

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Those to which any exception can be taken were written in deep distress, in the autumn and winter following the death of his wife. And "so singular was his condition at this time," Mr. Froude

Reminiscences. By Thomas Carlyle. Edited by
James Anthony Froude.. 2 vols.
London: Long-
mans and Co., 1881.

If then many of the things in this book which we are grieved to find in it had merely passed through Carlyle's mind, unspoken and unwritten, should we have thought him so very much to blame? Do we not all of us, when not determined to shut our eyes, see failings and disfigurements in our friends and associates, and find no fault with ourselves for seeing them, provided we make no mention of them?

But it will be said that in some instances Carlyle has imagined faults and disfigurements which did not exist, and has failed to see merits and attractions which did. That also will happen to most of us; allowing ourselves in our silent meditations to come to conclusions, both positive and negative, from inadequate premisses and with imperfect discernment.

Mr. Carlyle's will is now published, and adverts to "The manuscript is by no the MS. in these terms: means ready for publication; nay, the question how, when (after what delay, seven, ten years), it, or any portion of it, shall be published, are still dark to me; but on all such points James Anthony Froude's practical summing up and decision is to be taken as mine."

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No doubt it would be much better if we did no such thing; better if our secret thoughts went quite another way; especially when measuring the merits of those who have been kind to us; and it is not surprising that when the misappreciation is made known it should be angrily denounced by the friends of those who have suffered wrong. They may "be angry and sin not." And there are instances in which even others who stand apart must feel strongly in sympathy with those who are aggrieved. On the other hand, not a few of these hasty or unfounded judgments, as they impute no moral infirmity and inflict nothing that can be called a personal injury, need not be matter of personal reproach to their author; and those to whom they come amiss, whether on private grounds or on the ground of public interests involved in literary reputations, will be better employed, if they happen to be competent witnesses, in the rectification of what they know to be wrong than in censure and complaint.

pointing, but not much, though it would have given me pleasure had the robust veteran man emerged a little out of vocables into things, now and then, as he never once chanced to do." There is a good deal more of the like tone and tenor in giving an account of divers other conversations.

Now, all this might be a fair inference enough from what Carlyle happened to hear from Wordsworth in conversation; and Carlyle, speaking to himself, may not have thought it necessary to say to himself that an inference from a few examples is no more than an inference huc usque. But the inference was certainly an erroneous one. Those who have had a large experience of Wordsworth in conversation know that it was mere matter of accident whether he trod upon the earth or mounted into the skies. He never dreamt of display, and whatever topic, celestial or terrene, happened to come across him, he was equally ready to deal with. Whilst, therefore, I maintain that there is no ground for imputing to Carlyle any deliberately unjust disparagement, I think that I may claim more credit, as founded upon more knowledge, for my own estimate of Wordsworth's powers in conversation; and what that estimate was at the time of those conver

and what it is still, is expressed in a letter written there and then, though no doubt prompted by other examples than those at which Carlyle happened to be present:

have in the house.

As an example which falls to my own lot, I will advert to what is said about Wordsworth. Carlyle's insensibility to his powers as a poet it is needless to deal with. His work is before the world, and the world knows what it is worth. But everything that can throw light upon him is interesting, and when I read what Car-sations in my friend's house in London, lyle says of his conversation, I feel it due to his memory to say something of its effect on myself. And the more as it was through me that Carlyle became acquainted with Wordsworth, and most of the conversations in question took place in a house which he speaks of as mine.* He accords great praise to Wordsworth's faculty of delineating the men of his time. "Never, or never but once, had I seen a stronger intellect, a more luminous and veracious power of insight, directed upon such a survey of fellow-men and their contemporary journey through the world." † So far well; and it is evident that there was no desire to depreciate. But on another occasion when the talk was about literature, literary laws," etc., Wordsworth is represented as "joyfully reverent of the wells of English undefiled,' though stone dumb as to the deeper rules and wells of eternal truth and harmony, which you were to try and set forth by said undefiled wells of English or what other speech you had! To me a little disap

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This old philosopher is one of the most extraordinary human phenomena that one could helplessness of a child in regard to the little He has the simplicity and transactions of life; and whilst he is being directed and dealt with in regard to them, he keeps tumbling out the highest and deepest thoughts that the mind of man can reach, in a stream of discourse which is so oddly broken by the little hitches and interruptions of common life, that we admire and laugh at him by turns. Everything that comes into his mind comes out; weakness and strength; affections offered of seeing a human being through and or vanities; so that if ever an opportunity was through, we have it in the person of this "old man eloquent." †

Vol. ii., pp. 332-3.

† Mr. Carlyle's description, or rather his wife's,

adopted by him, of Mrs. Wordsworth, whom they once saw, or thought they saw, at a dinner party, is so wholly opposite, not only to what she was, but to what she was manifestly seen to be by those who did not know her as well as by those who did, that I cannot but think there was simply a mistake of one person for another. She was not "little" but rather tall; and as

Of Coleridge's gifts of speech Carlyle | but they were probably equal to those of is still less appreciative than of Words- Carlyle. It is only in his latter years and worth's: in his decline that he could be seen by I could not sleep at nights after hearing either of us, and what I recollect is, that him talk. Between April, 1823, and February, 1824, I kept an occasional diary, in which the last entries are these:

I had him to myself once or twice in various parts of the garden walk and tried hard to get something about Kant from him-about reason versus understanding and the like but in vain. Nothing came that was of use to me that day or, in fact, any day. The sight and sound of a sage who was so venerated by those about me, and whom I too would willingly have venerated but could not- this was all.*

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The

August 5, 1824. At Coleridge's again, and with the same company. He was this evening less vehement than I have heard him, but no

February 24, 1824. — Coleridge said he did not perceive his daughter's beauty. The perception of female beauty was the only thing in which his mind was conscious of age. It So in the "Reminiscences." But not had decayed with him. I expressed my adaltogether so in the "Life of Sterling."+miration of a distinct contour of features. There we find Coleridge to be "a sub- Coleridge concurred, but said "the contour of lime man; who alone in those dark days the face should be an act of the face, and not had saved his crown of spiritual man- something suffered by the face." hood; escaping from the black materi-traordinary evening I ever passed; Coleridge February 26, 1824. — Certainly the most exalisms and revolutionary deluges with with his luminous face and white head, Irving's 'God, Freedom, Immortality' still his wild dark locks and wilder eyes, and the keen a king of men.' And though this is analytical visage of Basil Montagu. followed by a long train of offsets, with poring and mining of Wordsworth out of the denials of any meaning being to be gath- depths of his intellect is not half so wonderful ered from the mysteries of his doctrinal as Coleridge was to-night, and the buoyancy of declamations, yet, all this notwithstand- Southey is only more delightful. ing, there were "glorious islets" to be seen "rising out of the haze”. 'balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible" and "eloquent artistically expressive words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came at intervals; tones of noble, pious sympathy, recognizable as pious though strangely colored, were never wanting long.' My experiences of Coleridge's conversation were in accord with what is thus expressed in the "Life of Sterling," and by no means with the passage from the "Reminiscences." What opportunities Carlyle had of listening to Coleridge, I know only from the "Reminiscences." They may not have been very ample. And there is this to be borne in mind- that Carlyle himself had a great gift of speech, and when these gifts confront each other, however amicably, the gifts of auscultation, whether on one side or the other, are not generally found to be great in proportion. My own opportunities were not so abundant in the case of Coleridge as in that of Wordsworth,

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to the other misrepresentations, what I have to say is,
that her manner and deportment were in entire har-
mony with her character- unexceptionable in their
quiet grace and easy simplicity; and that, like another
dweller in the woods and mountains known to her hus-
band, Nature had said of her when she was born, —
"This child I to myself will take,
She shall be mine and I will make
A Lady of mine own."

This was absolutely true of Mrs. Wordsworth.
Vol. i., pp. 230-1.

↑ Life of Sterling, chapter viii.

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less extraordinary and admirable. His language was less interrupted by logical catches, and more fanciful and romantic. For instance, in speaking of men led by age to fix their thoughts on that which was permanent within them, "when their eyes grew dimmer and their ears less apprehensive, and the objects which surrounded them more shadowy and cold, etc., etc.... He did not say that this would be life in trading, with only the principle of the case with the man who had spent all his money-getting, or in the pursuit of a not less foolish ambition, the man who chained himself to the wheel of events and was rolled rapidly on without being able to stop himself for an instant to think of anything further than the objects which surrounded him; who was in fact only a reflection of the surrounding objects-it was not to be said, when the objects grew dim and disappeared, but that he would go out-it was not to be said but that the mirror would be a blank, when the objects which were its population were removed, etc.

My diary goes no further, but I can add a supplement from a letter (February 18, 1829):

I have been two or three times to see the old gentleman this winter, and his talk has been sometimes exceedingly curious and sometimes very magnificent. I never knew such a scope of mind exhibited in any man, such largeness of views, together with such subtlety of insight, and a vivid imagination flashing through all.

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If Carlyle is less than just to Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the other hand

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