I think, far-fetched as it seems, it was seeing Carlyle's birthplace, and feeling the influence of his parents upon him, which made me understand. Great genius as he was, I wonder if he might not have been even greater if his mother or father had taught him that it was right to be happy and wrong to be sad? Sir S. says that Jenny his wife could have taught him all that, if he had chosen to learn; but he was grown up then, and so it was too late. The sunshine must be in your blood when you are a child, and then no shadows can ever quite darken the gold--or at least, that is the thought which has come into my mind to-day.
It was the right thing to turn southward off the Glasgow highway after Ecclefechan, to go to Annan and see the place where Carlyle got his schooling. The Gray Dragon, travelling slowly (for it, or "her," as Sir S. and Vedder always say), came to the end of the journey in a few minutes; but when Carlyle walked along that pleasant shadowy road, carrying his school books, he must have had plenty of time for day-dreams. Now and then he could have seen the Solway gleaming, and I can imagine how the beautiful, winding river must have given that grave, wise boy thoughts of the great river of life, running to and from eternity. We passed close to Hoddam Hill, where--Sir S. and Mrs. James told me--the Carlyle family lived for a while when Thomas was grown up, he translating German romances, and his brother working on the farm.
At Annan, looking at the statue of Carlyle's friend, Edward Irving, in the broad High Street, we came back to the subject of Doctor James, and I heard for the first time the real truth at the bottom of the bad gossip.
We had got down from the car to look at the statue, and read what it said on the pedestal. We were not thinking at first about the doctor, but only of Edward Irving, and Sir S. was saying to Mrs. James how Annan was only one of many towns where statues are put up to the memory of men once misunderstood and cruelly persecuted in the very place where they are afterward honoured. It seems that Edward Irving (who loved Mrs. Carlyle when she was Jenny Welsh) had to come back to his native town to be tried for heresy by the presbytery, after a brilliant career in London as a fashionable preacher and founder of a new faith. All the theologians of Scotland and crowds of other people (Sir S. says all true Scots are theologians at heart) came pouring into Annan by coach and chaise on the great day of the trial; and in spite of Irving's passionate appeal, he was found guilty by a unanimous vote.