78 OVER ON THE ISLAND

Her last letter to the earnest young thinker has come singing down through the years, and is quoted whenever the name of Margaret Gordon is mentioned. How well she understood and appreciated Carlyle’s genius and Carlyle’s weakness!

And now, my dear friend, a long, long adieu. One advice, and as a parting one consider, value it:— cultivate the milder dispositions of your heart, subdue the more extravagant visions of the brain. In time your abilities must be known; among your acquaintances they are already beheld with wonder and delight; by those whose opinions will be valuable they hereafter will be appreciated. Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved! Remove the awful distance between you and ordinary men, by kind and gentle manners; deal mildly with their inferiority, and be convinced they will respect you as much, and like you more. Why conceal the real goodness that flows in your heart?——I have ventured this counsel from an anxiety for your future welfare; and I would enforce it with all the earnestness of the most sincere friendship. “Let your light shine before men," and think them not unworthy this trouble. This exercise will prove its own reward. It must be a pleasing thing to live in the affections of others.

If Margaret Gordon had done nothing except to write that letter, she deserves a memorable name as a writer of good advice to caustic geniuses. Un- doubtedly she exerted a strong and persistent influence on this man of letters. He never forgot her. They met again for the last time at the gates of Hyde Park, “when her eyes (but that was all) said to me almost touchingly, ‘Yes, yes, that is you!’ "

There are several passages in Sartor Resartus that seem to point to Margaret Gordon as the original