IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE 165

It has no daintiness of garden nor wealth of farm about it, -is indeed little more than a delicately-built châlet, yet trim and domestic, mildly intelligent of things other than pastoral, watch-making and the like, though set in the midst of the meadows, the gentian at its door, the lily of the valley wild in the copses hard by.

My delight in these cottages, and in the sense of human industry and enjoyment through the whole scene, was at the root of all pleasure in its beauty; see the passage afterwards written in the Seven Lamps¹ insisting on this as if it were general to human nature thus to admire through sympathy. I have noticed since, with sorrowful accuracy, how many people there are who, wherever they find themselves, think only “of their position.”² But the feeling which gave me so much happiness, both then and through life, differed also curiously, in its impersonal character, from that of many even of the best and kindest persons.

192. In the beginning of the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence, edited with too little comment by my dear friend Charles Norton, I find at page 18 this-to me entirely disputable, and to my thought, so far as undisputed, much blameable and pitiable, exclamation of my master’s: “Not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth become a peopled garden.”³ My training, as the reader has perhaps enough perceived, produced in me the precisely opposite sentiment. My times of happiness had always been when nobody was thinking of me; and the main discomfort and drawback to all proceedings and designs, the attention and interference of the public-represented by my mother and the gardener. The garden was no waste place to me, because I did not

¹ [Ch. vi. § 1 (Vol. VIII. pp. 221 seq.); and compare Ruskin’s lecture on Land scape in Vol. XXXIII. p. 532.]

² [See Sesame and Lilies, Vol. XVIII. p. 54; and Vol. XXXIV. p. 75.]

³ [See The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872: 2 vols., 1883. The remark occurs in a letter of Carlyle dated 12th August 1834, but is given by him as a quotation, presumably from Emerson himself.]

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