144 BIRDS AND POETS 



the estimate of the author. There is no separating 

 them, as there never is in great examples. A curi- 

 ous perversity runs through all, but in no way viti- 

 ates the result. In both his moral and intellectual 

 natures, Carlyle seems made with a sort of stub and 

 twist, like the best gun-barrels. The knotty and 

 corrugated character of his sentences suits well the 

 peculiar and intense activity of his mind. What 

 a transition from his terse and sharply-articulated 

 pages, brimming with character and life, and a 

 strange mixture of rage, humor, tenderness, poetry, 

 philosophy, to the cold disbelief and municipal 

 splendor of Macaulay ! Nothing in Carlyle's contri- 

 butions seems fortuitous. It all flows from a good 

 and sufficient cause in the character of the man. 



Every great man is, in a certain way, an Atlas, 

 with the weight of the world upon him. And if 

 one is to criticise at all, he may say that, if Carlyle 

 had not been quite so conscious of this weight, his 

 work would have been better done. Yet to whom 

 do we owe more, even as Americans ? Anti-demo- 

 cratic in his opinions, he surely is not so in spirit, 

 or in the quality of his make. The nobility of la- 

 bor, and the essential nobility of man, were never 

 so effectively preached before. The deadliest enemy 

 of democracy is not the warning or dissenting voice, 

 but it is the spirit, rife among us, which would 

 engraft upon our hardy Western stock the sickly 

 and decayed standards of the expiring feudal world. 



With two or three exceptions, there is little as 

 yet in American literature that shows much advance 



