misfortune of such marked men that they cannot
allow other minds room to breathe and show them.
selves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease
to need from the experience of the humblest....
Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing, but in
his arrogance there is no littleness or self-love: it
is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian
conqueror; it is his nature, and the untameable
impulse that has given him power to crush the
dragons.
“For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd.... He puts out his chin sometimes till it looks like the beak of a bird; and his eyes flush bright, instinctive meanings, like Jove's bird. Yet he is not calm and grand enough for the eagle: he is more like the falcon, and yet not of gentle blood enough for that either.... I cannot speak more nor wiselier of him now; nor needs it. His works are true to blame and praise him,—the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than to legislate for good.”
In a letter to Emerson, Margaret gives some account of her visits at the Carlyle mansion. The second of these was on the occasion of a dinner-party, at which she met "a witty, French, flippant sort of a man, author of a History of Philosophy, and now writing a life of Goethe," presumably George Lewes. Margaret acknowledges that he told stories admirably, and that his occasional interruptions of Carlyle's persistent monologue were welcome. Of this, her summary is too interesting to be omitted here:—
“For a couple of hours he was talking about
