Now let us come down to Carlyle, and see what he says of Coleridge.  We need not take those conversational utterances which called down the wrath of Mr. Swinburne, and found expression in an epigram which violates all the proprieties of literary language.  Look at the full-length portrait in the Life of Sterling.  Each oracle denies his predecessor, each magician breaks the wand of the one who went before him.  There were Americans enough ready to swear by Carlyle until he broke his staff in meddling with our anti-slavery conflict, and buried it so many fathoms deep that it could never be fished out again.  It is rather singular that Johnson and Carlyle should each of them have shipwrecked his sagacity and shown a terrible leak in his moral sensibilities on coming in contact with American rocks and currents, with which neither had any special occasion to concern himself, and which both had a great deal better have steered clear of.

But here I stand once more before the home of the long-suffering, much-laboring, loud-complaining Heraclitus of his time, whose very smile had a grimness in it more ominous than his scowl.  Poor man!  Dyspeptic on a diet of oatmeal porridge; kept wide awake by crowing cocks; drummed out of his wits by long-continued piano-pounding; sharp of speech, I fear, to his high-strung wife, who gave him back as good as she got!  I hope I am mistaken about their everyday relations, but again I say, poor man!—­for all his complaining must have meant real discomfort, which a man of genius feels not less, certainly, than a common mortal.

I made a second visit to the place where he lived, but I saw nothing more than at the first.  I wanted to cross the threshold over which he walked so often, to see the noise-proof room in which he used to write, to look at the chimney-place down which the soot came, to sit where he used to sit and smoke his pipe, and to conjure up his wraith to look in once more upon his old deserted dwelling.  That vision was denied me.

After visiting Chelsea we drove round through Regent’s Park.  I suppose that if we use the superlative in speaking of Hyde Park, Regent’s Park will be the comparative, and Battersea Park the positive, ranking them in the descending grades of their hierarchy.  But this is my conjecture only, and the social geography of London is a subject which only one who has become familiarly acquainted with the place should speak of with any confidence.  A stranger coming to our city might think it made little difference whether his travelling Boston acquaintance lived in Alpha Avenue or in Omega Square, but he would have to learn that it is farther from one of these places to the other, a great deal farther, than it is from Beacon Street, Boston, to Fifth Avenue, New York.