A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE EOW 219 



dyspeptic, despondent, compassed about by dragons ' 

 and all manner of evil menacing forms; in fact, the 

 odds were fearfully against him, and yet he suc- 

 ceeded, and succeeded on his own terms. He fairly 

 conquered the world; yes, and the flesh and the 

 devil. But it was one incessant, heroic struggle 

 and wrestle from the first. All through his youth 

 and his early manhood he was nerving himself for 

 the conflict. Whenever he took counsel Avith him- 

 self it was to give his courage a new fillip. In his 

 letters to his people, in his private journal, in all his 

 meditations, he never loses the opportunity to take 

 a new hitch upon his resolution, to screw his pur- 

 pose up tighter. Not a moment's relaxation, but 

 ceaseless vigilance and "desperate hope." In 1830 

 he says in his journal: "Oh, I care not for poverty, 

 little even for disgrace, nothing at all for want of 

 renown. But the horrible feeling is when I cease 

 my own struggle, lose the consciousness of my own 

 strength, and become positively quite worldly and 

 wicked." A year later he wrote: "To it, thou 

 Taugenichts ! Gird thyself ! stir ! struggle ! for- 

 ward! forward! Thou art bundled up here and 

 tied as in a sack. On, then, as in a sack race; 

 running, not raging ! " Carlyle made no terms with 

 himself nor with others. He would not agree to 

 keep the peace ; he would be the voice of absolute 

 conscience, of absolute justice, come what come 

 might. "Woe to them that are at ease in Zion," 

 he once said to John Sterling. The stern, uncom- 

 promising front which he first turned to the world 



