the Hawks.

Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British
dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy
straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid
bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in
front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or
apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle
allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery;
an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its
magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother,
and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit,
and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was
Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual
forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations.

"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and
spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals,
nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of
Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in
his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as
a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran
warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude,
against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food
of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of
action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous,
the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his
deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his
wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was
great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out