to Goethe:--

Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of
Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here
to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results.
But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of
life, and to secure the independence through which I could
be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our
own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases
ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the
monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry,
about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola
and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I
was born, and there both father and mother still live to
love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have
written since I came here is an Essay on Burns.

This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in
the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal
and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den,"
elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he
confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have
really had enough."

Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam.

Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for
the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he
called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the
den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently