A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE BOW. 227 



which lie in quite different planes, and the passage 

 between which is steep and rough. Hence the pain, 

 the struggle, the picturesque power. Try to shape 

 the actual world of politics and human affairs accord- 

 ing to the ideal truth, and see if you keep your se- 

 renity. There is a Niagara gulf between them that 

 must be bridged. But what a gripe this man had 

 upon both shores, the real and the ideal. The qual- 

 ity of action, of tangible performance, that lies in 

 his works, is unique. " He has not so much written 

 as spoken," and he has not so much spoken as he 

 has actually wrought. He experienced, in each of 

 his books, the pain and the antagonism of the man 

 of action. His mental mood and attitude are the 

 same; as is also his impatience of abstractions, of 

 theories, of subtleties, of mere words. Indeed, Car- 

 lyJe was essentially a man of action, as he himself 

 seemed to think, driven by fate into literature. He 

 is as real and as earnest as Luther or Cromwell, and 

 his faults are the same in kind. Not the mere say- 

 ing of a thing satisfies him as it does Emerson ; you 

 must do it ; bring order out of chaos, make the dead 

 alive, make the past present, in some way make your 

 fine sayings point to, or result in, fact. He says the 

 Perennial lies always in the Concrete. Subtlety of 

 intellect, which conducts you " not to new clearness, 

 but to ever - new abstruseness, wheel within wheel, 

 depth under depth," has no charms for him. " My 

 erudite friend, the astonishing intellect that occupies 

 itself in splitting hairs, and not in twisting some kind 



