Following this pleasant bit of breathing space, with its walks that wind in and out among the bushes, one comes unexpectedly upon a bronze statue.  You need not read the inscription:  a glance at that shaggy head, the grave, sober, earnest look, and you exclaim under your breath, “Carlyle!”

In this statue the artist has caught with rare skill the look of reverie and repose.  One can imagine that on a certain night, as the mists and shadows of evening were gathering along the dark river, the gaunt form, wrapped in its accustomed cloak, came stalking down the little street to the park, just as he did thousands of times, and taking his seat in the big chair fell asleep.  In the morning the children that came to play along the river found the form in cold, enduring bronze.

At the play we have seen the marble transformed by love into beauteous life.  How much easier the reverse—­here where souls stay only a day!

Cheyne Row is a little, alley-like street, running only a block, with fifteen houses on one side, and twelve on the other.

These houses are all brick and built right up to the sidewalk.  On the north side they are all in one block, and one at first sees no touch of individuality in any of them.

They are old, and solid, and plain—­built for revenue only.  On closer view I thought one or two had been painted, and on one there was a cornice that set it off from the rest.  As I stood on the opposite side and looked at this row of houses, I observed that Number Five was the dingiest and plainest of them all.  For there were dark shutters instead of blinds, and these shutters were closed, all save one rebel that swung and creaked in the breeze.  Over the doorway, sparrows had made their nests and were fighting and scolding.  Swallows hovered above the chimney; dust, cobwebs, neglect were all about.

And as I looked there came to me the words of Ursa Thomas: 

    “Brief, brawling day, with its noisy phantoms, its paper crowns,
    tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine, everlasting night, with her
    star diadems, with her silences and her verities, is come.”

Here walked Thomas and Jeannie one fair May morning in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four.  Thomas was thirty-nine, tall and swarthy, strong; with set mouth and three wrinkles on his forehead that told of care and dyspepsia.  Jeannie was younger; her face winsome, just a trifle anxious, with luminous, gentle eyes, suggestive of patience, truth and loyalty.  They looked like country folks, did these two.  They examined the surroundings, consulted together—­sixty pounds rent a year seemed very high!  But they took the house, and T. Carlyle, son of James Carlyle, stone-mason, paid rent for it every month for half a century, lacking three years.

I walked across the street and read the inscription on the marble tablet inserted in the front of the house above the lower windows.  It informs the stranger that Thomas Carlyle lived here from Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four to Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one, and that the tablet was erected by the Carlyle Society of London.