80 IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY. 



the reader on his way, not to beguile or amuse him, 

 was always his purpose. He had that contempt for 

 all dallying and toying and lightness and frivolous- 

 ness that hard, serious workers always have. He 

 was impatient of poetry and art; they savored too 

 much of play and levity. His own work was not 

 done lightly and easily, but with labor throes and 

 pains, as of planting his piers in a weltering flood and 

 chaos. The spirit of struggling and wrestling which 

 he had inherited was always uppermost. It seems 

 as if the travail and yearning of his mother had 

 passed upon him as a birth-mark. The universe was 

 madly rushing about him, seeking to engulf him. 

 Things assumed threatening and spectral shapes. 

 There was little joy or serenity for him. -Every 

 task he proposed to himself was a struggle with 

 chaos and darkness, real or imaginary. He speaks 

 of " Frederick " as a nightmare ; the " Cromwell 

 business" as toiling amid mountains of dust. I know 

 of no other man in literature with whom the sense of 

 labor is so tangible and terrible. That vast, grim, 

 struggling, silent, inarticulate array of ancestral force 

 that lay in him, when the burden of written speech 

 was laid upon it, half rebelled, and would not cease 

 to struggle and be inarticulate. There was a pleth- 

 ora of power : a channel, as through rocks, had to 

 be made for it, and there was an incipient cataclysm 

 whenever a book was to be written. What brings 

 joy and buoyancy to other men, namely, a genial 

 task, brought despair and convulsions to him. It is 



