144 BIRDS AND POETS 
the estimate of the author. There is no separating 
them, as there never is in great examples. A curi- 
ous perversity runs through all, but in no way viti- 
ates the result. In both his moral and intellectual 
natures, Carlyle seems made with a sort of stub and 
twist, like the best gun-barrels. The knotty and 
corrugated character of his sentences suits well the 
peculiar and intense activity of his mind. What 
a transition from his terse and sharply-articulated 
pages, brimming with character and life, and a 
strange mixture of rage, humor, tenderness, poetry, 
philosophy, to the cold disbelief and municipal 
splendor of Macaulay! Nothing in Carlyle’s contri- 
butions seems fortuitous. It all flows from a good 
and sufficient cause in the character of the man. 
Every great man is, in a certain way, an Atlas, 
with the weight of the world upon him. And if 
one is to criticise at all, he may say that, if Carlyle 
had not been quite so conscious of this weight, his 
work would have been better done. Yet to whom 
do we owe more, even as Americans? Anti-demo- 
cratic in his opinions, he surely is not so in spirit, 
or in the quality of his make. The nobility of la- 
bor, and the essential nobility of man, were never 
so effectively preached before. The deadliest enemy 
of democracy is not the warning or dissenting voice, 
but it is the spirit, rife among us, which would 
engraft upon our hardy Western stock the sickly 
and decayed standards of the expiring feudal world. 
With two or three exceptions, there is little as 
yet in American literature that shows much advance 
