At the beginning of his "English Traits," Mr. Emerson, writing of
his visit to England in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says
that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of
whom Carlyle was one, that had led him to Europe. Carlyle's name
was not then generally known, and it illustrates Emerson's mental
attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius,
and felt sympathy with it.

The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in
English thought and imagination. All the great literary
reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron,
Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say.
The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found
expression. But toward the end of this time a series of
articles, mostly on German literature, appearing in the Edinburgh
and in the Foreign Quarterly Review, an essay on Burns, another
on Voltaire, still more a paper entitled "Characteristics,"
displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy
with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its
time, and capable of giving them expression. Here was a writer
whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words
stood for realities. His power was slowly acknowledged. As yet
Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his
contemporaries.

He was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope,"
at Craigenputtock. On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his
Journal as follows: "I am left here the solitariest, stranded,
most helpless creature that I have been for many years.....
Nobody asks me to work at articles. The thing I want to write is