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Updated: June 17, 2025
At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme for "rhinoceros," and for Tennyson's diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were found for "Ecclefechan" and "Craigenputtock." But in rhyming ingenuity Browning is inferior to the author of "Hudibras," in a rhymer's elegant effrontery he is inferior to the author of "Don Juan."
Your poor Tom, long out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do."
But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built Sartor Resartus and the Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless.
Ecclefechan! Why that's where Carlyle was born!" "Aye, sir, and he's buried there; a great mon he was but an infideel." Ten miles beyond Gretna Green is Ecclefechan a little village of stucco houses all stretched out on one street. Plain, homely, rocky and unromantic is the country round about, and plain, homely and unromantic is the little house where Carlyle was born.
The little village of Ecclefechan was about six miles from the Solway Firth, among the pasture lands of the bale of Annan. Here Thomas grew to be a boy running about barefooted and sturdy with his many brothers and sisters, and one step- brother older than himself.
James Carlyle with his own hands built, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety, this house at Ecclefechan. The same year he married an excellent woman, a second cousin, by name Janet Carlyle. She lived but a year. The poor husband was heartbroken, and declared, as many men under like conditions had done before and have done since, that his sorrow was inconsolable.
A little later, after Septimus had inspected her morning's work in the flat, and the night's progress in the boy's tooth, and the pretty new blouse which she had put on in his honor, and the rose in her bosom taken from the bunch he had sent to greet her arrival in the flat the night before, and after he had heard of the valorous adventure of Madame Bolivard and of a message from Hégisippe Cruchot which she had forgotten to deliver overnight, and of an announcement from Zora to the effect that she would call at Ecclefechan Mansions soon after lunch, and of many things of infinite importance, Emmy asked him what Clem Sypher had been doing, and wherein lay the particular magnificence of character to which Septimus had alluded.
I don't know exactly what a human document is; still, I suppose I shall go to the graveyards for the sake of finding out what he means. He spoke as if I were likely to go to these places with him, and said that he would enjoy showing me Carlyle's house in Chelsea, which is "more full of the man's heart and soul than Ecclefechan is." But, of course, he said this without stopping to think.
This is what I thought as I stood in Ecclefechan kirkyard, and as I lingered I almost doubted if Carlyle COULD be dead. Was it possible that such as he could altogether die? Some touch, some turn, I could not tell what or how, seemed all that was necessary to enable me to see and to hear him.
Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days. "To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen."
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