aenold's view of emeeson and caelyle 161 



that is always its saving feature. One's unhappi- 

 ness may he selfish and ignohle, or it may be noble 

 and inspiring; all depends upon the sentiment from 

 ■which it springs. Men selfishly wretched never 

 laugh, except in derision. Carlyle was a man of 

 sorrow, and sorrow springs from sympathy and love. 

 A sorrowing man is a loving man. His is the Old 

 World sorrow, the inheritance of ages, the grief of 

 justice and retribution over the accumulated wrongs 

 and sufferings of centuries. In him it became a 

 kind of poetic sentiment, a fertile leaf-mould that 

 issued at last in positive verdure and bloom. Not 

 happiness, but a kind of blessedness, he aspired to, 

 the satisfaction of suffering in well-doing. How 

 he loves all the battling, struggling, heroic souls! 

 Whenever he comes upon one such in his histories, 

 no matter how obscure, he turns aside to lay a 

 wreath upon his tomb. It was his own glory that 

 he never flinched; that his despair only nerved him 

 to work the harder; the thicker the gloom, the 

 more his light shone. Hope and heart never left 

 him; they were of the unquenchable, the inextin- 

 guishable kind, like those ragged jets of flame the 

 traveler used to see above the oil wells or gas wells 

 in Pennsylvania, which the wildest tempest could 

 not blow out, so tenaciously and desperately did the 

 flame cling. 



Carlyle's lamentations are loud; a little of his 

 own doctrine of silence would have come in well 

 here. What he said of Voltaire the world is bound 

 to say of himself: "Truly M. de Voltaire had a 



