But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat,
and nobody to bid those poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They
burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to
attend to them." Here is the germ of his book on "Chartism." Emerson
and he talk of the immortality of the soul, seated on the hill-tops
near Old Criffel, and looking down "into Wordsworth's country."
Carlyle had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to
bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where
no step can be taken; but he was honest and true, and cognizant of the
subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects
all the future. "Christ died on the tree; that built Dunscore Kirk
yonder; that brought you and me together. Time has only a relative
existence."
Such is Emerson's account of his first visit to our author, whose eyes
were already turned towards London as the heart of the world, whither
he subsequently went, and where he now abides.
From Craigenputtock, with its savage rocks and moorlands, its
sheepwalk solitudes, its isolation and distance from all the
advantages of civil and intellectual life, to London and the living
solitude of its unnumberable inhabitants, its activities, polity, and
world-wide ramifications of commerce, learning, science, literature,
and art, was a change of great magnitude, whose true proportions it
took time to estimate.
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