"]
Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow,
which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in
the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of
letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the
Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There
is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the
poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness
to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was
entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart,
misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat,
fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three
weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise,
... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered,
etc.
What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards
stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack?
Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood.
"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than
it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his
mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a
matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have
seemed as if possessed.
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