must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without
a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold
fast by the Manilla ship, _and do not let go the painter_.

Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's
despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to
spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter
of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its
drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest
descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat.

According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates
are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being
introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by
her old tutor, Edward Irving--an event which marks the beginning of a new
era in his career--took place towards the close of May or in the first
week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in _Sartor_ as
the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of
revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk--Rue St. Thomas de
l'Enfer in the Romance--on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in
the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it
is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St.
Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse.
It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was
but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood
of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of
eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdroeckh had
darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself.
If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath,"
careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire