238 LITEEAHT VALUES 



Speaking of these two rare men, each, so attrac- 

 tive to the other, how unlike they were in their atti- 

 tude toward the past, — the one with that yearning, 

 wistful, backward glance, bearing the burden of an 

 Old World sorrow and remorse, long generations of 

 baffled, repressed, struggling humanity coming to 

 full consciousness in him ; the other serene, hopeful, 

 optimistic, with the spell of the New World upon 

 him, turning cheerfully and confidently to the future ! 

 Emerson describes himself as an endless seeker with 

 no past at his back. He seemed to have no regrets, 

 no wistful retrospections. His mood is affirmative 

 and expectant. The power of the past was not upon 

 him, but it had laid its hand heavily upon his 

 British brother, so heavily that at times it almost 

 overpowered him. Carlyle's dominant note is dis- 

 tinctively that of retrospection. He yearns for the 

 old days. The dead call to him from their graves. 

 In the present he sees little, from the future he 

 expects less ; all is in the past. How he magnifies 

 it, how he re-creates it and reads his own heroic 

 temper into it ! The twelfth century is more to 

 him than the nineteenth. 



It is true that the present time is more or less 

 prosy, vulgar, commonplace to most men ; not till 

 we have lived it and colored it with our own experi- 

 ences does it begin to draw us. This seems to have 

 been preeminently the case with Carlyle ; he was 

 morbidly sensitive to the crude and prosy present, 

 and almost preternaturally alive to the glamour of 

 the past. What men had done, what they had 



