Yet he has never, we understand, visited Germany. He was, originally, destined for the church. At one period he taught an academy in Dysart, at the same time that Irving was teaching in Kirkaldy. After his marriage, he resided partly at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; and, for a year or two in Craigenputtock, a wild and solitary farm house in the upper part of Dumfriesshire. Here, however, far from society, save that of the " great dumb monsters of mountains," he wearied out his very heart. A ludicrous story is told of Lord Jeffrey visiting him in this out-of-the-way region, when they were unapprized of his coming-had nothing in the house fit for the palate of the critic, and had, in dire haste and pother, to send off for the wherewithal to a market town about fifteen miles off. Here, too, as we may see hereafter, Emerson, on his way home from Italy, dropped in like a spirit, spent precisely twenty-four hours, and then "forth uprose that lone wayfaring man," to return to his native woods. He has, for several years of late, resided in Chelsea, London, where he lives in a plain simple fashion; occasionally, but seldom, appearing at the splendid soirées of Lady Blessington, but listened to, when he goes, as an oracle; receiving, at his tea-table, visitors from every part of the world; forming an amicable centre for men of the most opposite opinions and professions, Poets and Preachers, Pantheists and Puritans, Tennysons and Scotts, Cavanaighs and Erskines, Sterlings and Robertsons, smoking his perpetual pipe, and pouring out, in copious stream, his rich and quaint philosophy. His appearance is fine, without being ostentatiously singular;-his hair dark,-his brow marked, though neither very broad nor very lofty,—his cheek tinged with a healthy red,—his eye, the truest index of his genius, flashing out, at times, a wild and mystic fire from its dark and quiet surface. He is above the middle size, stoops

slightly, dresses carefully, but without any approach to foppery. His address, somewhat high and distant at first, softens into simplicity and cordial kindness. His conversation is abundant, inartificial, flowing on, and warbling as it flows, more practical than you would expect from the cast of his writings, picturesque and graphic in a high measure, -full of the results of extensive and minute observation, often terribly direct and strong, garnished with French and German phrase, rendered racy by the accompaniment of the purest Annandale accent, and coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.

Altogether, in an age of singularities, Thomas Carlyle stands peculiarly alone. Generally known, and warmly appreciated, he has of late become-popular, in the strict sense, he is not, and may never be. His works may never climb the family library, nor his name become a household word; but while the Thomsons and the Campbells shed their gentle genius, like light, into the hall and the hovel,— the shop of the artisan and the sheiling of the shepherd, Carlyle, like the Landors and Lambs of this age, and the Brownes and Burtons of a past, will exert a more limited but profounder power,-cast a dimmer but more gorgeous radiance, attract fewer but more devoted admirers, and obtain an equal, and perhaps more enviable immortality.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

CONCEIVE a little, pale-faced, wo-begone, and attenuated man, with short, indescribables, no coat, check shirt, and neckcloth twisted like a wisp of straw, opening the door of

his room in street, advancing towards you with hurried movement, and half-recognizing glance; saluting you in low and hesitating tones, asking you to be seated; and after he has taken a seat opposite you, but without looking you in the face, beginning to pour into your willing ear, a stream of learning and wisdom as long as you are content to listen, or to lend him the slightest cue. Who is it? 'Tis De Quincey, the celebrated Opium eater, the friend and interpreter of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the sounder of metaphysic depths, and the dreamer of imaginative dreams, the most learned and most singular man alive, the most gifted of scholars, the most scholar-like of men of genius. He has come from his desk, where he has been prosecuting his profound researches, or, peradventure, inditing a popular paper for Tait, or a more elaborate and recondite paper for Blackwood. Your first feeling as he enters, is, Can this be he? Is this the distinguished scholar? Is this the impassioned autobiographer? Is this the man who has recorded such gorgeous visions, seen by him while shut up in the Patmos of a laudanum phial? His head is small, how can it carry all he knows? His brow is singular in shape, but not particularly large or prominent where has nature expressed his majestic intellect? His eyes-they sparkle not, they shine not, they are lustreless can that be a squint which glances over from them towards you? No! it is only a slight habit one of them has of occasionally looking in a different direction from the other; there is nothing else particular about them; there is not even the glare which lights up sometimes dull eyes into eloquence; and yet, even at first, the tout ensemble strikes you as that of no common man, and you say, ere he has opened his lips, "He is either mad or inspired."

But sit and listen to him; hear his small, thin, yet piercing

voice, winding out so distinctly his subtleties of thought and feeling; his long and strange sentences, evolving like a piece of complicated music, and including every thing in their comprehensive sweep; his interminable digressions, striking off at every possible angle from the main stream of his discourse, and ever returning to it again; his quotations from favourite authors, so perpetual and so appropriate; his recitation of passages from the poets in a tone of tremulous earnestness; his vast stores of learning, peeping out every now and then through the loopholes of his small and searching talk; his occasional bursts of eloquent enthusiasm ; his rich collection of anecdote; his uniform urbanity and willingness to allow you your full share in the conversation.—Witness all this for an hour together, and you will say at the close, "This is the best living image of Burke and Coleridge, this is an extraordinary man.' You sit and listen, and as the evening steals on, his sentences get longer and longer, and yet your inclination to weary gets less and less. Your attention is fixed by hooks of steel, and at three in the morning you rise unsatiated. You leave him on his way to his desk to study till peep of dawn, and going home, your dreams are haunted by the wondrous little man, and you seem still to hear him, with his keen low voice, out-Kanting Kant, or out-mystifying Caleridge, or demolishing some rickety literary reputation, or quoting, in his deep and quiet under tone, some of the burning words of Shelley or Wordsworth.

De Quincey has a powerful but imperfect mind. In one sense, indeed, it seems one of the most perfect and thoroughly furnished of understandings. It has imagination in a high measure. It has a still larger share of sympathy with the imagination of others. It has a most subtle and searching intellect. It has varied and boundless information. It has a dictatorial command of language. Where, then, lies its im

perfection? It lies, we think, in the want of unity and proper compactness among its various faculties. They are all powerfully developed, but not properly balanced. The consequence is, that the one sometimes usurps the province of the other. He sometimes declaims when he should analyze, and sometimes analyzes when he should describe. And hence, too, all his efforts have been fragmentary,-each fragment colossal, indeed, and so far as it goes, finished, (for it is easy distinguishing the rude fragment of a rock from the splinter of a statue,) but still a fragment. He has produced no perfect and consummate whole. This was to be expected in his autobiographical sketches, but we find it pervading all his writings, and his only completed work ("Klosterheim") is a completed failure. Perhaps the necessities of his lot, and his one unfortunate propensity, account for this. Perhaps, also, there is, amid his lofty endowments, an infirmity of purpose, one weak place which has damaged the whole, one leak in the stately vessel, which has, if not sunk it, at least abridged its voyages, and lessened its power. The "Confessions of an Opium Eater" took the public by storm. Its popularity was immediate and boundless; nor, even yet, has it declined. The copy of it we first read was from a circulating library, and had nearly crumbled away. The sources. of its success were obvious enough. First of all, the thing was written with prodigious force and spirit. People who judge of De Quincey's style from his contributions to Tait and Blackwood, have no proper idea of it. There the "line labours and the words move slow." It is the noble charger jaded and worn out. In the "Confessions," he is seen rioting in his strength. In his magazine articles the effort is visible, while the "Confessions" are sketched with a pencil of fire. The starvation scenes in London, the story of Ann, the poor street-stroller, who saved his life, and whom, in the