deal. When I first settled here, the ground around the house was sour moorland. I made the walk, planted the trees, built the mosshouse, erected the sun-dial, brought home the rhododendrons and fed them with the mould which they love so well. I am the creator of every blossom, of every odour that comes and goes in the wind. The rustle of my trees is to my ear what his child's voice is to my friends the village doctor or the village clergyman. I know the genealogy of every tree and plant in my garden. I watch their growth as a father watches the growth of his children. It is curious enough, as showing from what sources objects derive their importance, that if you have once planted a tree for other than mere commercial purposes-and in that case it is usually done by your orders and by the hands of hirelings-you have always in it a quite peculiar interest. You care more for it than you care for all the forests of Norway or America. You have planted it, and that is sufficient to make it peculiar amongst the trees of the world. This personal interest I take in every inmate of my garden, and this interest I have increased by sedulous watching. But really trees and plants resemble human beings in many ways. You shake a packet of seed into your forcing-frame, and while some grow, others pine and die, or struggle on under hereditary defect, showing indifferent blossoms late in the season, and succumb at length. So far as one could discover, the seeds were originally alike they received the same care, they were fed by the same moisture and sunlight, but of no two of them are the issues the same. Do I not see something of this kind in the world of men, and can I not please myself with quaint analogies? These plants and trees have their seasons of illness, and their sudden deaths. Your best rose-tree, whose fame has spread for twenty miles, is smitten by some fell disease; its leaves take an unhealthy hue, and in a day or so it is sapless-dead. A tree of mine, the first last spring to put out its leaves, and which wore them till November, made this spring no green response to the call of the sunshine. Marvelling what ailed it, I went to examine, and found it had been dead for months-and yet during the winter there had been no frost to speak of, and more than its brothers and sisters it was in no way exposed. These are the tragedies of the garden, and they shadow forth other tragedies nearer us. In everything we find a kind of dim mirror of ourselves. Sterne, if placed in a desert, said he would love a tree; and I can fancy such a love would not be altogether unsatisfying. Love of trees and plants is safe. You do not run risk in your affections. They are my children, silent and beautiful, untouched by any passion, unpolluted by evil tempers; for me they leaf and flower themselves. In autumn they put off their rich apparel, but next year they are back again with dresses fair as ever; and-one can extract a kind of fanciful bitter ness from the thought-should I be laid in my grave in winter, they would all in spring be back again with faces as bright and with breaths as sweet, missing me not at all. Ungrateful, the one I am fondest of would blossom very prettily if planted on the soil that covers me-where my dog would die, where my best friend would perhaps raise an inscription ! I like flowering plants, but I like trees more, for the reason, I suppose, that they are slower in coming to maturity, are longer-lived, that you can become better acquainted with them, and that in the course of years memories and associations hang as thickly on their boughs as do leaves in summer or fruits in autumn. I do not wonder that great earls value their trees, and never, save in direst extremity, lift upon them the axe. Ancient descent and glory are made audible in the proud murmur of immemorial woods. There are forests in England whose leafy noises may be shaped into Agincourt and the names of the battlefields of the Roses; oaks that dropped their acorns in the year that Henry VIII. held his field of the Cloth of Gold, and beeches that gave shelter to the deer when Shakespeare was a boy. There they stand, in sun and shower, the broad-armed witnesses of perished centuries; and sore must his need be who commands a woodland massacre. A great English tree, the rings of a century in its bole, is one of the noblest of natural objects; and it touches the imagination no less than the eye, for it grows out of tradition and a past order of things, and is pathetic with the suggestions of dead generations. Trees waving a colony of rooks in the wind to-day, are older than historic lines. Trees are your best antiques. There are cedars on Lebanon which the axes of Solomon spared, they say, when he was busy with his Temple; there are olives on Olivet that might have rustled in the ears of the Master and the Twelve; there are oaks in Sherwood, which have tingled to the horn of Robin Hood, and have listened to Maid Marian's laugh. Think of an existing Syrian cedar which is nearly as old as history, which was middle-aged before the wolf suckled Romulus; think of an existing English elm in whose branches the heron was reared which the hawks of Saxon Harold killed! If you are a notable, and wish to be remembered, better plant a tree than build a city or strike a medal-it will outlast both. My trees are young enough, and if they do not take me away into the past, they project me into the future. When I planted them, I knew I was performing an act, the issues of which would outlast me long. My oaks are but saplings; but what undreamed-of English kings will they not outlive? I pluck my apples, my pears, my plums; and I know that from the same branches other hands will pluck apples, pears, and plums, when this body of mine will have shrunk into a pinch of dust. I cannot dream with what year these hands will date their letters. A man does not plant a tree for himself, he plants it for posterity. And sitting idly in the sunshine, I think at times of the unborn people who will, to some small extent, be indebted to me. Remember me kindly, ye future men and women! When I am dead, the juice of my apples will foam and spirt in your cider presses, my plums will gather for you their misty bloom; and that any of your youngsters should be choked by one of my cherry-stones, merciful Heaven forfend! old, unmarried, and a humorist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles. Perhaps what he has seen of the world-its sins, its sorrows, its deathbeds, its widows and orphans-has tamed his spirit and put a tenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a man who so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature produces sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is a tree that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful in his reverence for the Book, his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have come to colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his ordinary speech. He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else, and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him at his tea-table or walking with him on the country roads. He does not feel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air. The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the clergyman, but he is impatient of pale or limit; he never comes to a fence without feeling a desire to get over it. He is a great hunter of insects, and he thinks that the wings of his butterflies might yield very excellent texts; he is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in the company of the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at Moses. He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons, to annoy if he cannot subdue; and when his purpose is served, he puts his scepticism aside, as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great arguments arise between them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss of temper, which, however, he regains before any harm is done. For the worthy man is irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him. In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audience in my garden rather than in my house. In all my interviews the sun is a third party. Every village has its fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp is not without one. Him I get to run my messages for me, and he occasionally turns my garden borders with a neat hand enough. He and I hold frequent converse, and people here, I have been told, think we have certain points of sympathy. Although this is not meant for a compliment, I take it for one. The poor, faithful creature's brain has strange visitors: now 'tis fun, now wisdom, and now something which seems in the queerest way a compound of both. He lives in a kind of twilight which observes objects, and his remarks seem to come from another world than that in which ordinary people live. He is the only original person of my acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form a singular commentary on those generally accepted. He is dull enough at times, poor fellow; but anon he startles you with something, and you think he must have wandered out of Shakespeare's plays into this out-of-the-way place. Up from the village now and then comes to visit me the tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hankering after red republicanism, and the After an outburst there is a truce between the destruction of Queen, Lords, and Commons. friends for a while, till it is broken by theologiGuy Fawkes is, I believe, the only martyr in his cal battle over the age of the world, or some calendar. The sourest-tempered man, I think, other the like remote matter, which seems imthat ever engaged in the manufacture of sweet-portant to me only in so far as it affords ground meats. I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikes himself. To be at all consistent, he should put poison in his lozenges and become the Herod of the village innocents. One of his many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often to have a look at my greenhouse and my borders. I listen to his truculent and revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomy egotist away with a nosegay in his hand and a gay-coloured flower stuck in a button-hole. He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire. The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine; they come to visit me often and smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a goodhumoured passage of arms. The clergyman is for disputation. These truces are broken sometimes by the doctor, sometimes by the clergyman. T'other evening the doctor and myself were sitting in the garden smoking each a meditative pipe. Dreamthorp lay below, with its old castle and its lake and its hundred wreaths of smoke floating upward into the sunset. Where we sat the voices of children playing in the street could hardly reach us. Suddenly a step was heard on the gravel, and the next moment the clergyman appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar airiness of aspect and the light of a humorous satisfaction in his eye. After the usual salutations, he took his seat beside us, lifted a pipe of the kind called "church-warden" from the box on the ground, filled and lighted it, and for a little while we were silent all three. The clergyman then drew an old magazine from his side-pocket, opened it at a place where the leaf had been carefully turned down, and drew my attention to a short poem, which had for its title "Vanity Fair," imprinted in German text. This poem he desired me to read aloud. Laying down my pipe carefully beside me, I complied with his request. It ran thus, for as after my friends went it was left behind, I have written it down word for word: "The world-old Fair of Vanity Since Bunyan's days has grown discreeter; "Not that a single inch it swerves From hate of saint, or love of sinner; "Raise but a shout, or flaunt a scarf- "They live upon each newest thing, They fill their idle days with seeing; Fresh news of courtier and of king Sustains their empty being. "The statelier, from year to year, Maintain their comfortable stationa "While through it heaves, with cheers and groans, Amongst them tongues are wagging much : "All things are made for talk-St Paul- "And much they knew, that sneering crew, Of things above the world and under: They searched the hoary deep; they knew The secret of the thunder; "The pure white arrow of the light They split into its colours seven; "They've found out life and death-the first A dissolution into gases. "And vice and virtue are akin As black and white from Adam issueOne flesh, one blood, though sheeted in A different-coloured tissue. "Their science groped from star to star, When I had done reading these verses, the clergyman glanced slyly along to see the effect of his shot. The doctor drew two or three hurried whiffs, gave a huge grunt of scorn, then turning sharply, asked, "What is 'a reverent ignorance?' What is a knowledge atheistic?"" The clergyman, skewered by the sudden question, wriggled a little, and then began to explain, with no great heart, however, for he had had his little joke out, and did not care to carry it further. The doctor listened for a little, and then, laying down his pipe, said with some heat, "It won't do. 'Reverent ignorance' and such trash is a mere jingle of words; that you know as well as I. You stumbled on these verses, and brought them up here to throw them at me. They don't harm me in the least, I can assure you. There is no use," continued the doctor, mollifying at the sight of his friend's countenance, and seeing how the land lay-" there is no use speaking on such matters to our incurious, solitary friend here, who could bask comfortably in sunshine for a century without once inquiring whence came the light and heat. But let me tell you," lifting his pipe and shaking it across me at the clergyman, that science has done services to your cloth which have not always received the most grateful acknowledgments. Why, man"-here he began to fill his pipe slowly-"the theologian and the man of science, although they seem to diverge and lose sight of each other, are all the while working to one end. Two exploring parties in Australia set out from one point; the one goes east and the other west. They lose sight of each other, they know nothing of one another's whereabouts, but they are all steering to one point"-the sharp spurt of a fusee on the garden-seat came in here, followed by an aromatic flavour in the air-" and when they do meet, which they are certain to do in the long run"-here the doctor put the pipe in his mouth, and finished his speech with it there -"the figure of the continent has become known, and may be set down in maps. The exploring parties have started long ago. What folly in the one to pooh-pooh, or be suspicious of the exertions of the other. That party de 66 serves the greatest credit which meets the other more than half way." "Bravo!" cried the clergyman when the doctor had finished his oration; "I don't know that I could fill your place at the bed-side, but I am quite sure that you could fill mine in the pulpit." "I am not sure that the congregation would approve of the change-I might disturb their slumbers;" and, pleased with his retort, his cheery laugh rose through a cloud of smoke into the sunset. Heigho! mine is a dull life, I fear, when this little affair of the doctor and the clergyman takes the dignity of an incident and seems worthy of being recorded. The doctor was anxious that during the following winter a short course of lectures should be delivered in the village schoolroom, and in my garden he held several conferences on the matter with the clergyman and myself. It was arranged finally that the lectures should be delivered, and that one of them should be delivered by me. I need not say how pleasant was the writing out of my discourse, and how the pleasure was heightened by the slightest thrill of alarm at my own temerity. My lecture I copied out in my most careful hand, and, as I had it by heart, I used to declaim passages of it ensconced in my moss-house, or concealed behind my shrubbery trees. In these places I tried it all over sentence by sentence. The evening came at last which had been looked forward to for a couple of months or more. The small schoolroom was filled by forms on which the people sat, and a small reading-desk, with a tumbler of water on it, at the further end, waited for me. When I took my seat, the couple of hundred eyes struck into me a certain awe. I discovered in a moment why the orator of the hustings is so deferential to the mob. You may despise every individual member of your audience, but these despised individuals, in their capacity of a collective body, overpower you. I addressed the people with the most unfeigned respect. When I began, too, I found what a dreadful thing it is to hear your own voice inhabiting the silence. You are related to your voice, and yet divorced from it. It is you, and yet a thing apart. All the time it is going on you can be critical as to its tone, volume, cadence, and other qualities, as if it was the voice of a stranger. Gradually, however, I got accustomed to my voice, and the respect which I entertained for my hearers so far relaxed that I was at last able to look them in the face. I saw the doctor and the clergyman smile encouragingly, and my half-witted gardener looking up at me with open mouth, and the atrabilious confectioner clap his hands, which made me take refuge in my paper again. I got to the end of my task without any remarkable incident, if I except the doctor's once calling out "hear" loudly, which brought the heart into my mouth and blurred half a sentence. When I sat down, there were the usual sounds of approbation, and the confectioner returned thanks in the name of the audience. MR CARLYLE AT EDINBURGH.* On the day of the address, the doors of the Music Hall were besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived; and loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd, one could not help glancing curiously down Pitt Street, towards the "lang toun of Kirkcaldy," dimly seen beyond the Forth; for on the sands there in the early years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed to pace up and down solitarily, and "as if the sands were his own," people say, who remember when they were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired, swift-gestured, squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy too, as successor to Edward Irving in the Grammar School, came young Carlyle from Edinburgh College, wildly in love with German and mathematics; and the schoolroom in which these men taught, although incorporated in Provost Swan's manufactory, is yet kept sacred and intact, and but little changed these fifty years— an act of hero-worship for which the present and other generations may be thankful. It seemed to me that so glancing Fifewards, and thinking of that noble friendship-of the David and Jonathan of so many years a-gone-was the best preparation for the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear. David and Jonathan! Jonathan stumbled and fell on the dark hills, not of Gilboa, but of Vanity; and David sang his funeral song: "But for him I had never known what the communion of man with man His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world, or now hope to find." means. In a very few minutes after the doors were opened, the large hall was filled in every part; and when up the central passage the Principal, the Lord Rector, the members of the Senate, and other gentlemen advanced towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous and hearty. The Principal occupied the chair, of course; the Lord Rector on his right, the Lord Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemen had taken their seats, every eye was fixed on the Rector. To all appearance, as he sat, time and labour had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet lost the country bronze which he brought up with him from Dumfriesshire as a student, fifty-six years ago. His long residence in London had not touched his Annandale look, nor had it as we soon learned-touched his * On the occasion of the Rectorial Address delivered to the students of the University of Edinburgh, April 2, 1866.-From "Last Leaves," etc. Annandale accent. His countenance was striking, homely, sincere, truthful-the countenance of a man on whom "the burden of the unintelligible world" had weighed more heavily than on most. His hair was yet almost dark; his moustache and short beard were iron-grey. His eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrowful; and seemed as if they had been at times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite, which had never been polished to any approved pattern, whose natural and original vitality had never been tampered with. In a word, there seemed no passivity about Mr Carlyle; he was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass; he was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon-a man to set his mark on the world-a man on whom the world could not set its mark. And just as, glancing towards Fife a few minutes before, one could not help thinking of his early connection | with Edward Irving, so seeing him sit beside the venerable Principal of the University, one could not help thinking of his earliest connection with literature. Time brings men into the most unexpected relationships. When the Principal was plain Mr Brewster, editor of the Edinburgh Cyclopædia, little dreaming that he should ever be Knight of Hanover, and head of the Northern Metropolitan University, Mr Carlyle -just as little dreaming that he should be the foremost man of letters of his day, and Lord Rector of the same University-was his contributor, writing for said Cyclopædia biographies of Voltaire and other notables. And so it came about that, after years of separation and of honourable labour, the old editor and contributor were brought together again-in new relations. The proceedings began by the conferring of the degree of LL.D. on Mr Erskine of Linlathenan old friend of Mr Carlyle's-on Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. That done, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically waved, Mr Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial robe-which must have been a very shirt of Nessus to himadvanced to the table, and began to speak in low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance with the melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale accent with which his play-fellows must have been familiar long ago. So selfcentred was he, so impregnable to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh and London life could not impair, even in the slightest degree, that. The opening sentences were lost in the applause, and when it subsided, the low, plaintive, quavering voice was heard going on: "Your enthusiasm towards me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when in a position analogous to your own." And then came the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reach ing reminiscence and sigh over old gravesfather's and mother's, Edward Irving's, John Stirling's, Charles Buller's, and all the noble known in past time-and with its flash of melancholy scorn: "There are now fifty-six years gone, last November, since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen-fifty-six years ago-to attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I knew not what-with feelings of wonder and awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to. There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up, and saying: 'Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard. You have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges."" And thereafter, without any aid of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same wistful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a touch of quaint humour by the way, which came in upon his subject like glimpses of pleasant sunshine, the old man talked to his vast audience about the origin and function of universities, the old Greeks and Romans, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence of silence as compared with speech, the value of courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance of taking care of one's health. "There is no kind of achievement you could make in the world that is equal to perfect health. What to it are nuggets and millions? The French financier said: 'Alas!"why is there no sleep to be sold?' Sleep was not in the market at any quotation." But what need of quoting a speech which by this time has been read by everybody? Appraise it as you please, it was a thing per se. Just as, if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the Murex; if you wish ivory, you must go to the East; so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh listened to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It may not be quite to your taste, but, in any case, there is no other intellectual warehouse in which that kind of article is kept in stock. Criticism and comment, both provincial and metropolitan, have been busy with the speech, making the best and the worst of it; but it will long be memorable to those who were present and listened. Beyond all other living men, Mr Carlyle has coloured the thought of his time. He is above all things original. Search where you will, you will not find his duplicate. Just as Wordsworth brought a new eye to nature, Mr Carlyle has brought a new eye into the realms of Biography and History. Helvellyn and Skiddaw, Grassmere and Fairfield, are seen now by the tourist even, through the glamour of the poet; and Robespierre and Mirabeau, Cromwell and Frederic, Luther and Knox, stand at present, and may for a long time stand, in the somewhat lurid torchlight of Mr Carlyle's genius. |