CARLYLE. 139 



all those qualities which poets were forced to imagine 

 and typify because they could not find them in the 

 actual world. 



In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle 

 was the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincer- 

 ity, manliness, and of a living faith, instead of a dron- 

 ing ritual. He had intense convictions, and he made 

 disciples. With a compass of diction unequalled by any 

 other public performer of the time, ranging as it did 

 from the unbooked freshness of the Scottish peasant to 

 the most far-sought phrase of literary curiosity, with 

 humor, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was no wonder 

 that he found eager listeners in a world longing for a 

 sensation, and forced to put up with the West-End 

 gospel of " Pelham." If not a profound thinker, he had 

 what was next best, — he felt profoundly, and his cry 

 came out of the depths. The stern Calvinism of his 

 early training was rekindled by his imagination to the 

 old fervor of Wishart and Brown, and became a new 

 phenomenon as he reproduced it subtilized by German 

 transcendentalism and German culture. Imagination, 

 if it lays hold of a Scotchman, possesses him in the old 

 demoniac sense of the word, and that hard logical 

 nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it, 

 burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to 

 utilize these sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary 

 man is always tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boil- 

 ing, — is such a thing possible? Only too possible, wo 

 fear ; and Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the lan- 

 guid public long for a sensation, the excitement of 

 making one becomes also a necessity of the successful 

 author, as the intellectual nerves grow duller and the 

 old inspiration that came unbidden to the bare garret 

 grows shier and shier of the comfortable parlor. As ho 

 himself said thirty years ago of Edward Irving, " Un- 



