fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as
in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend
itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to
show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be
united with a coarse and ignoble heart."]

The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet
oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some
critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough,
Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and
the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom
of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures.

[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his
New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green
forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.]

Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the
Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been
successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine.
It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across
the Atlantic, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ would have found
the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or
London.

The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on
Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His
few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed
merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr.
Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but