" Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the
_Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly
growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any
promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his
own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr uebel: all dim, misty, squally,
disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather
than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede.
He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more
contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's
_Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of
_Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay
and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in
the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through
glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At
last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife
approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his
fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the
initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to
London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in
Chelsea near the Thames.
CHAPTER IV
CHEYNE ROW
[1834-1842]
The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills,
and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds,
as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea,
dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the
excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle
Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a
stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square.
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