A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 259 



ciding, by the count of heads, whether Jones or Smith 

 should go to Parliament or to Congress was equiva- 

 lent to sitting in judgment upon the law of gravita- 

 tion. What the ship in doubling Cape Horn would 

 very likely do, if it found itself officerless, would be 

 to choose, by some method more or less approaching 

 a count of heads, a captain, an ablest man to take 

 command, and put the vessel through. If none were 

 able, then indeed the case were desperate; with or 

 without the ballot-box, the abyss would be pretty 

 sure of a victim. In any case there would perhaps 

 be as little voting to annul the storms, or change the 

 ocean currents, as there is in democracies to settle 

 ethical or scientific principles by an appeal to uni- 

 versal suffrage. But Carlyle was fated to see the 

 abyss lurking under, and the eternities presiding over 

 every act of life. He saw everything in fearful gi- 

 gantic perspective. It is true that one cannot loosen 

 the latchet of his shoe without bending to forces that 

 are cosmical, sidereal ; but whether he bends or not, 

 or this way or that, he passes no verdict upon them. 

 The temporary, the expedient all those devices 

 and adjustments that are of the nature of scaf- 

 folding, and that enter so largely into the admin- 

 istration of the coarser affairs of this world, were 

 with Carlyle equivalent to the false, the sham, the 

 phantasmal, and he would none of them. As the 

 ages seem to have settled themselves for the present 

 and the future, in all civilized countries, and es- 

 pecially in America, politics is little more than 



