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Updated: May 1, 2025
John Welsh, medical practitioner in Haddington, who had died two years before, leaving his daughter sole heiress of the small estate of Craigenputtock, sixteen miles from the town of Dumfries.
She screamed at him when her nerves were too unstrung; and then, with a natural reaction, she called herself "a devil who could never be good enough for him." But most of her letters were harsh and filled with bitterness, and, no doubt, his conduct to her was at times no better than her own. But it was at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm the road to fame.
Emerson's devotion in seeking his friend in his bare home among what he describes as the "desolate heathery hills" about Craigenputtock, which were, I suppose, much like the region through which we were passing. It is one of the regrets of my life that I never saw or heard Carlyle.
She screamed at him when her nerves were too unstrung; and then, with a natural reaction, she called herself "a devil who could never be good enough for him." But most of her letters were harsh and filled with bitterness, and, no doubt, his conduct to her was at times no better than her own. But it was at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm the road to fame.
But his wife would not hear a word about it; she had had enough of the country, at Craigenputtock. Meanwhile preparations for the Life of Cromwell went on slowly, varied by visits to his relatives in Scotland, travels on the Continent, and interviews with distinguished men.
It was then that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all night watching his Perseus in the furnace came into my head, and suddenly I asked myself: 'After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers, what is the mighty difference between a statue of Perseus and a loaf of bread, so that each be the thing that one's hand has found to do? ... If he had been a woman living at Craigenputtock, with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same qualities would have come out more fitly in a good loaf of bread.
The chief of the essays which he produced at Craigenputtock are those on Burns, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, and Schiller.
Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year.
Emerson found him, in the year 1833, on the occasion of his first visit to England, living at Craigenputtock, a farm in Nithsdale, far away from all civilization, and "no one to talk to but the minister of the parish." He, good man, could make but little of his solitary friend, and must many a time have been startled out of his canonicals by the strange, alien speeches which he heard.
But the greatest thing that he did at Craigenputtock was the thorough fermentation, clearing, and settling of himself. When he went there, at nearly thirty-three, it was more uncertain what would come of him than it is in the case of many a man when he leaves the University at three and twenty.
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