When Emerson was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods. Life was not worth living--the whole world was rotten and wrong--and he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's _Golden Legend_, why God didn't lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like glass. Men were fools and liars, and impostors and quackery reigned supreme. "And in a world like this, George," he was concluding with a tragic emphasis, "I see nothing for it, for two honest men like you and me, but just to sit down on yon heap of road metal and have a quiet smoke together."
I wish I could tell the third story with half the gusto with which Dawson related it. At the time of that visit to Germany of which I have already spoken, there was no Prussian Empire. Bismarck may, even then, have dreamed of it, but what is now a united Germany was split into an infinite number of little principalities. In one of these, a Serene Transparency--or some personage of that order--held rule over a handful of subjects. It happened that he was a profound worshipper of Carlyle, regarding him as the greatest humorist, philosopher and historian of his age. He wrote to Carlyle a letter full of German enthusiasms, begging him to name an hour at which he could present himself for the personal delivery of his homage. "But," said Carlyle, "we are in the man's territory and it is only in the fitness of things that we should pay our respects to him." Accordingly the two set out together and reaching the palace proposed to send in their names. They were encountered by some kind of glorified flunkey, an official of the toy court of the principality--who assured Carlyle that it was impossible to present him to the Serene Transparency in the costume he was then wearing. Carlyle wanted sardonically to know what was the matter with the costume, and the major-domo instanced his hat. Carlyle tore the hat savagely from his head and punched it two or three times before he thundered: If His Serene Transparency objected to the hat he might object; it was the only hat the philosopher owned and he had no immediate intention to provide himself with another! And whilst he was brandishing the hat and raging at the astonished major-domo, who should appear on the scene but His Serene Transparency, who rushed forward and, falling on his knees, embraced the legs of the amazed philosopher. Dawson declared the whole scene to have been beyond pen and pencil. Carlyle's face was a wonder for wrath and astonishment, but that of the court official was beyond speaking for amazement. Who or what he supposed the visitor to be was altogether beyond conjecture!