274 A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 



familiar, the commonplace, is torn away. The nat- 

 ural becomes the supernatural. Every question, every 

 character, every duty, was seen against the immensi- 

 ties, like figures in the night against a background of 

 fire, and seen as if for the first time. The sidereal, 

 the cosmical, the eternal, we grow familiar with 

 these or lose sight of them entirely. But Carlyle 

 never lost sight of them ; his sense of them became 

 morbidly acute, preternaturally developed, and it was 

 as if he saw every movement of the hand, every fall 

 of a leaf, as an emanation of solar energy. A " hag- 

 gard mood of the imagination " (his own phrase) 

 was habitual with him. He could see only the trag- 

 ical in life and in history. Events were imminent, 

 poised like avalanches that a word might loosen. 

 We see Jeffries perpetually amazed at his earnest- 

 ness, the gradations in his mind were so steep ; the 

 descent from the thought to the deed was so swift 

 and inevitable, that the witty advocate came to look 

 upon him as a man to be avoided. 



" Daily and hourly," he says (at the age of 38), 

 " the world natural grows more of a world magical 

 to me ; this is as it should be. Daily, too, I see 

 that there is no true poetry but in reality." 



" The gist of my whole way of thought," he says 

 again, " is to raise the natural to the supernatural." 

 To his brother John he wrote in 1832 : " I get more 

 earnest, graver, not unhappier every day. The whole 

 creation seems more and more divine to me, the nat- 

 ural more and more supernatural." His eighty-five 



