Mrs. Norton had marvellously beautiful and expressive eyes, such as one seldom meets thrice in a life. As a harp well played inspires tears or the impulse to dance, so her glances conveyed, almost in the same instant, deep emotion and exquisite merriment. I remember that she was much amused with some of my American jests and reminiscences, and was always prompt to respond, eodem genere. So nightingale the wodewale answereth.
During this season in London I met Thomas Carlyle. Our mutual friend, Moncure Conway, had arranged that I should call on the great writer at the house of the latter in Chelsea. I went there at about eleven in the morning, and when Mr. Carlyle entered the room I was amazed—I may say almost awed—by something which was altogether unexpected, and this was his extraordinary likeness to my late
father. A slight resemblance to Carlyle may be seen in my own profile, but had he been with my father, the pair might have passed for twins; and in iron-grey grimness and the never-to-be-convinced expression of the eyes they were identity itself.
I can only remember that for the first twenty or thirty minutes Mr. Carlyle talked such a lot of skimble-skamble stuff and rubbish, which sounded like the very débris and lees of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets,” that I began to suspect that he was quizzing me, or that this was the manner in which he ladled out Carlyleism to visitors who came to be Carlyled and acted unto. It struck me as if Mr. Tennyson, bored with lion-hunting guests, had begun to repeat his poetry to them out of sheer sarcasm, or as if he felt, “Well, you’ve come to see and hear me—a poet—so take your poetry, and be d---d to you!” However, it may be I felt a coming wrath, and the Socratic demon or gypsy dook, which often rises in me on such occasions, and never deceives me, gave me a strong premonition that there was to be, if not an exemplary row, at least a lively incident which was to put a snapped end to this humbugging.
It came thus. All at once Mr. Carlyle abruptly asked me, in a manner or with an intonation which sounded to me almost semi-contemptuous, “And what kind of an American may you be?” (I think he said “will you be?”) “German, or Irish, or what?”
To which I replied, not over amiably:—
“Since it interests you, Mr. Carlyle, to know the origin of my family, I may say that I am descended from Henry Leland, whom the tradition declares to have been a noted Puritan, and active in the politics of his time,’ and who went to America in 1636.”
To this Mr. Carlyle replied:—
“I doubt whether any of your family have since been equal to your old Puritan great-grandfather” (or “done anything to equal your old Puritan grandfather”). With this
something to the effect that we had done nothing in America since Cromwell’s Revolution, equal to it in importance or of any importance.