CARLYLE AT THE GRAVE OF HIS WIFE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3023, 4 March 1881, Page 4

CARLYLE AT THE GRAVE OF HIS WIFE.

The following little story of Carlyle, which we find in a pamphlet by John Swinton, descriptivs of a recent brief visit to Europe, will disclose to many readers of that rugged and vehement essayist, the sage of Chelsea, an almost unsuspected trait of gentleness in his character. It is a very touching picture of Carlyle in his lonely old age which it presents. Mr Swinton found the grave of Mrs Carlyle in the cathedral at Haddington, and on the stone is cut Carlyle's tribute to her, in which, after referring to her long years of helpful companionship, he says that by her death ' the light of his life is clean gone out.' Mr Swinton continues:

" And Mr Carlyle." said the sexton, "comes here from London now and then to see this grave. He is a gaunt, shaggy, weird kind of old man, looking rery old the last time he was here. " "He is eighty-six now," said I. "Aye" he repeated, eighty-six, and comes here to this grave all the way from London." And I told the sexton that Carlyle was a great man, the greatest man of the age in books, and that his name was known all over the world, but the sexton thought there were other great men lying near at hand, though I told him their fame did not reach beyond the graveyard, and brought him back to talk of Carlyle. "Mr Carlyle himself" said the gravedigger, softly, "is to bo brought here to be buried with his wife, aye. He comes here lonesome and alone," continued the gravedigger, "when he visits the wife's grave. His niece keeps him company to the gate, but he leaves her there, and she stays therefor him. The last time he was here I got sight of him, and he was bowed down under his white hairs, and he took his way up by that ruined wall of the old cathedral, and round there and in here by the gateway, and he tottered up here to this spot." Softly spake the gravedigger, and paused. Softer still, in the broad dialect of the Lothians, he proceeded : " And he stood hero awhile in the grass, and then he kneeled down and stayed on his knees at the grave ; then he bent over, ancl I saw him kiss the ground —aye, he kissed it again and again, and he kept kneeling, and it was a long time before he rose and tottered out of the cathedral, ancl wandered through the graveyard to the gate, where his niece stood waiting for him." ' I almost shrink from putting on paper these words of the rustic gravedigger that day; but it is not the scene for art ancl poetry ? And does it not show the rugged sham destroyer of other days, he of the sanguinary blade, and the loud artillery, in a finer light than that of any page of his hundred books ?'