A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 281 



grounds. It is his utterances as a seer touching con- 

 duct, touching duty, touching nature, touching the 

 soul, touching life, that most concern us, the ideal 

 to be cherished, the standard he held to. 



Carlyle was a poet touched with religious wrath 

 and fervor, and he confronted his times and country 

 as squarely and in the same spirit as did the old 

 prophets. He predicts nothing, foretells nothing, ex- 

 cept death and destruction to those who depart from 

 the ways of the Lord, or, in modern phrase, from 

 nature and truth. He shared the Hebraic sense of 

 the awful mystery and fearfulness of life and the 

 splendor and inexorableness of the moral law. His 

 habitual mood was not one of contemplation and en- 

 joyment, but of struggle and " desperate hope." The 

 deep Biblical word fear fear of the Lord, he knew 

 what that meant, as few moderns did. 



He was antagonistic to his country and his times, 

 and who would have had him otherwise ? Let him 

 be the hammer on the other side that clinches the 

 pail. He did not believe in democracy, in popular 

 sovereignty, in the progress of the species, in the po- 

 litical equality of Jesus and Judas : in fact, he repudi- 

 ated with mingled wrath and sorrow the whole Amer- 

 ican idea and theory of politics ; yet who shall say 

 that his central doctrine of the survival of the fittest, 

 fche nobility of labor, the exaltation of justice, valor, 

 pity, the leadership of character, truth, nobility, wis- 

 dom, etc., is really and finally inconsistent with, or 

 inimical to, that which is valuable and permanent and 



