"another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to
Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di
non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact,
and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of
cymbals!]

"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and
all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie."

The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from
his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter
Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in
Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new
Annual Register, designed to be a literary _resume_ of the year, make up
the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic
life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox
honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom
saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and
read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the
author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought
alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did
not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but
there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles,
Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not
succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful
whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater
quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell
vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a
natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the
Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of