Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 35: A Monthly Review; January-June 1894
If I pull through this it will be all your care, all your doing.' These words (i give them from memory), uttered the night before his death, were meant for no car but that of the tireless nurse, watcher, secretary, servant, in case of need, to whom they were addressed; and whose whole life had been, for many years, devoted to the one Object Of preserving that Of her husband. Utterly hateful to me as are the Violations of a privacy that should be sacred, now too common, I have sought and Obtained permission to commit this, and take all responsi bility for it. For the pitiful circumstances Of Tyndall's death are known to all the world and I think it well that all the world Should be enabled to see those circumstances by the light which shines forth, alike on the dead and on the living, from the poor crumpled piece of paper on which these treasured words were, at once, recorded.
But I have wandered far from the year 1851 and its nascent friendships.
At that time, Tyndall and I had long been zealous students of Carlyle's works. Sartm' Resa'rtus and the M iscella/nies were among the few books devoured partly by myself, and partly by the mighty hordes of cockroaches in my cabin, during the cruise of the Rattle snake; and my sense of Obligation to their author was then, as it remains, extremely strong. Tyndall's appreciation Of the seer Of Chelsea was even more enthusiastic; and, in after years, assumed a. Character of almost filial devotion. The grounds Of our appreciation, however, were not exactly the same. My friend, I think, was dis posed to regard Carlyle as a great teacher; I was rather inclined to take him as a great tonic as a source Of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus and refreshment, rather than of theoretical or practical guidance. Half a century ago, the evangelical reaction which, for a time, had braced English society was dying out, and a scum of rotten and hypocritical conventionalism clogged art, literature, science, and politics. I might quarrel with something every few paragraphs, but passing from the current platitudes to Carlyle's vigorous pages was like being transported from the stucco, pavement, and fog of a London street to one of his own breezy moors. The country was full of boulders and bogs, to be sure, and by no means calculated for building leases; but, Oh the freshness and the freedom of it!
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