mighty billows beneath them that rise and move and toss them about as foam. Yet, I dare to say, it was not always so to you, nor any of us. There was a time, I doubt not, when Shakespere's words were unfortunately but too opaque to us. Nay, are there not times even now, when the first few speeches of the play seem somehow strangely full of the most unnatural and uncouth blocks-of the most obnoxious and obstructive bowlders; which flee not-vanish not-till, to the chin immersed, we float and live within that giant element? To the suckling who as yet knows not the taste of wine, but only milk, Shakespere always has appeared so; and always will remain so. To him he can only seem an incongruous farrago of rant, fustian, bombast, and 'clotted nonsense;' whom only a Hume, a Voltaire, and a Byron rate at his price. And yet to this suckling, to whom Shakespere is an abortion, will Pope and Goldsmith loom out Heroes! Does not this somehow seem to contain the question? Does not the quarrel between substance and form seem indicated and settled here? Kneller pointed out Pope to a rough Sea-Captain as the greatest man in the world. The Captain was astonished; and so, I have no doubt, you would have been. Surely the greatest man in the world was something different from this smoother and polisher, this trimmer of a line and clipper of a couplet! Surely the greatest man in the world rested his greatness on something more genuine and real than the arrangement of his words!

I assert then that all our early tests for literary merit are crude, and jejune, and inconsequent; and that we must not allow any such to interfere with our judgment of Carlyle. Style and graces of literature are crutches which he has long since thrown away; and his object now is to speak out his mind at once to his fellows. The polished dexterity of your Pope, and even the sweet sentimentalism of your Goldsmith, are very fine things for accomplished leisure. They are incomparable resources for those who, following Chesterfield, are anxious to occupy each interval of business or of pleasure with the pages of a good author.' They are unequalled additaments and flavors to the urbanity of the drawingroom and the rurality of the cottage. But, after all, they are simply akin to knick-knacks and bijouterie, to articles of vertù, to brooches and bracelets and breast-pins they glitter like them, and lend their lustre and their ornament to precisely the same sections of space and time-to precisely the same modes of existence that render them effective or discernible. They belong, in short, to conventionalism; and are admirable there; adding the finishing zest to the delight of the cottage,the last and supreme charm to the grace of the drawing-room. But what are they when the storms pipe? What are they when the hurricane unroofs cottage and drawing-room, turning you out naked to your mother earth, with only your instincts of a man to lean on? What are they in the coil of evil and of good that constitutes existence? What are they in the week-day struggle, the hourly canker, the perpetual fear, the constant calculation, the unappeasable forecast? For the accomplished only, who, in fact, have their cottage and their drawing-room and their hours of idleness, are these books anything. To the fighting-man actually out on the present world, continually calling on his instincts for means and ways to keep his boat afloat, they are gauds and toys that he can only throw to the right hand and the left.

This, my dear A., is defending Carlyle on the very lowest grounds; but, as my

object is to reconcile you to him, I am obliged to take them. Carlyle then is no fine writer; does not profess to be such; does not want to be such. He desires simply to speak the truth to his fellows. He labors under insight of much to their advantage; and he is delighted to get rid of it as best he can. To turn a period is not his aim; and, perhaps, even as a question of art, he is not sure that the balanced sing-song, the alternating see-saw of Robertson and the rest, where the murmur of the manner beguiles probably writer as well as reader into oblivion of the matter-is actually the best mode of writing. But, be that as it may, fine writing is not his object; Time is too precious to him to be wasted in picking words; he is not particular about them; he will take them as they come; content if they deliver him of the big giant that convulses him.

I do not mean to praise his dialect. I will grant, if you wish it, that he blows a trumpet as rough and raucous as a toop's horn. I will grant that he does not always attain to a musical and harmonious expression of himself—to a one, complete, well-knit, and symmetrical exposition of himself-to a minerva-like, fullarmed outburst of himself from the riven head of his painëd Jove. I will grant that his cries are more the broken exclamations, the disconnected and discordant shrieks, of some old prophet whom the god tears. But what are these admissions to the point? In the name of all ends and consequences, what odds about the manner, if we have the matter? Why curl up our noses at the form, if we have the substance? What odds what sort of a trumpet it is, if it be a trumpet? What matter what kind of a dialect it be, if it can be mastered, and if it contain secrets worthy to be mastered? Of what mighty consequence is it, what are the prophet's words, if they be a prophet's words?

And this brings me to say that Carlyle does not use such words as 'God's fact,' 'God's truth,' without authority. He is a prophet-start not!-as genuine as any Jeremiah or Ezekiel of them all. Even as they screamed, and shrieked, and shook the lightning of God's wrath over the sliding Judah, so does Carlyle scream, and shriek, and shake the lightning of God's wrath over the sliding England, and the sliding Europe, and the sliding world! It is a God's truth, and it is a God's fact; and, commissioned of God Almighty himself, comes he to declare them. And thanks to the great God that he has come! Thanksthanks-that, in these days of Mammon and the Devil, we too have a prophetwe too have a man divinely-sent to re-open heaven for us! The tower of godlessness has reached its utmost height and culminating pinnacle, and now-even now -it blackens to its base. Thanks to the Unforgetting that we have now among us one who can foresee the fall and guide us from the ruin! In very truth, our social condition has reached that stage at which, in all times past, only a new prophet, only a new religion, could succour and deliver us. So it was when Confucius and Mahomet, and others the like, came-so it was when a holier than these came! And, now, in these present days, after our Keplers and Newtons, our Davys and Berzeliuses, our Humes and Voltaires, our Franklins and Adam Smiths, our Columbuses and Watts, our trades and commerce,-only in the shape of such men as Carlyle and Emerson can we receive our prophets.

But I wish to reconcile you to dear, dear Carlyle; and I will descend from a point of view that may appear to you, if not impious, at least ridiculous, and speak to you of him on more every-day grounds.

Well then, I at once assert Thomas Carlyle to be the English writer whom it is most to our present interest to read and understand. In him, and so far as I know, in him alone, are the statement and approximate solution of the vital problems of existence now. Difficulties bearing on the secret experience of each of us-difficulties affecting Religion, History, Literature, Philosophy-difficulties relating to Politics and the Social condition of the day: these are his familiars; and they stand around his circle, orderly. What a change he has produced on the whole field of intellectual vision! He seems to have rolled round almost an entire new hemisphere of thought upon us.. To the fervid souls of the gifted young, who had fed as yet but on the literature of the last century, with its Humes, its Popes, its Goldsmiths, its Smolletts, and its Fieldings-or who, at best and at length, perhaps, had but kindled up to Byron and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats-what a sudden out-burst of the sun it was, the coming-in of Carlyle! To these books of his, be their origin where it may, must be attributed an entire intellectual revolution in England. Coleridge, it is true, brought sparks; but Carlyle set down the whole fire bodily. A great, blind wall that seemed to shut us up from vision and from effort furthermore, Carlyle unexpectedly hewed from before us; and new Savannahs opened to our reach, with the dew still fresh on the untrodden blades.

I dare be bound for it, there is not one honest, fervid soul in these realms, who does not regard his introduction to Carlyle as the opening of a new era to him,—almost of a new world. Here is a man,' he cried, who at length speaks up to me-into my inmost soul; that tells me the very things I have so longed to hear, but never dreamed to hear; and all has changed to me.' It seems as if an eclipse had passed: a moment ago we were in the dark; we see now. Religion, in regard to which we had raised before us a very mountain of an obstacle, has grown a pleasant country, easy and inhabitable; while criticism and history and philosophy have become equally rich and new. We have attained a secret so fine and subtle that it explains all, and is applicable to all. We have become masters of a talisman: Genii throng around us; the universe is no longer solid and unyielding, but plastic as the potter's clay-visible and intelligible in every corner. The scales have fallen from our eyes; and the images of the past melt from before us, like the wreck of a foolish dream. It is many years now since I was at College; but such influence of Carlyle was not limited to me: not one young soul of any honesty and truth but flamed beneath him.

I remember I was a boy, somewhere about fifteen, when, in a circulating library, conducted by an enterprizing youth on the moderate terms of one ha'penny per volume per week,-I picked up the three compact, clear-typed, meaning-looking volumes of Goethe's Meister. I had read the name; and I sounded it Goth. I had seen my father read his autobiography; and I even recollected the contrast of the German with the French fencing-master. But this was all. Goethe's place, or his Meister's place, in Germany or anywhere, in his own works, or in any body else's works-was unknown to me. The book was to me only a German Novel-only a German Romance-and it was simply devoured as such. Things in it stuck to me, however; and I went back to it again and again: the Translator's Preface, in especial, remained with me a perpetual speculation. I was very ignorant of this Goethe; but I must be still more igno

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rant of the Translator, whose very name appeared not. The doer into English of a novel, and from the German too-of a surety, but a hack he must be and forever to be ignored. But such a Preface! What composition! How it glowed with Genius! Was it genius then? Would judges say so? Would judges call it good even? If it was good and if it was genius, was it possible that its originator could be nameless? Was it possible that a man might have all this genius, and write like this, and yet be unknown? And so I puzzled and puzzled myself, and—I sighed! You may fancy then the burst of surprize and delight with which, when meeting with the Sartor in Frazer, and speaking of it to some one, I greeted the information that its author was a well-known literary character, who smoked his pipe allday, wrote the strangest, deepest things in the world, was the best German Scholar of the time, and had-translated Goethe's Meister! Such joy as was mine-joy as over victory-heartfelt, grateful joy as over the establishment of the fact that good could not die nor genius hide. The question of questions was solved to me: even in this world, good was good, and high, high.

Here then was an external source of interest in Carlyle; and work after work of his fell rapidly into my hands. How I read! with such fierce, keen, shivering, feverish eagerness I read! How I fed at every pore! How I glowed and grew over his Burnses and Heynes and Diderots and Werners and Hoffmans and Schillers and Tiecks and Richters and Goethes ! Such things are nameless: it was a sea of splendor; and I bathed in ecstasy. The deliverer had come-the interpreter-the toucher of all my stops-I was free, clear, strong, and joyous. Do I tell a singular tale? No: a thousand eyelids glitter with the tear that owns my story theirs.

My object, dear A., by this digression is to show you that style, your first repulsion, constituted my first attraction to Carlyle. His earlier style, however, is widely different from his later. Nothing can be more felicitous, compact, and symmetrical than the composition of his first works. It is even musical. With these it is then, that the student of Carlyle ought to begin. Suppose, then, you take up his critical essays, and open at the Samuel Johnson. Well, no doubt, you know the glorious old bear that has made himself immortal by his letter to Chesterfield; and you have read all about him in the Valet-like tittle-tattle of that disgusting little fellow, that fluttered and trembled before the rude, big Englishman, because he was a Scotchman; and stammered out that "Indeed, indeed, it was not his fault-he could not help it." Fault! you dastardly little villain! it was a fault somewhere then? Yes; the brave who feel it an honor and a pride for them to have had their limbs grown out of that glorious little nation, consider it a disgrace and a fault for you!

Well-just see the Cosmos out of Bozzian Chaos-the image out of the mistthat Carlyle condenses before your eyes. There he is bodily before them, with his scars, and his short-sight, and his crusty prejudices, and his solid brain, and his sturdy heart, and his yearning for the Religion he heard the noise of the workmen, loosening, and defacing, and pulling down around him! There he is, as he never was before; and you feel him to be the genuine.

Open again at our own darling Burns, the great, wild-hearted giant, with bone and muscle to unfix a universe. Open there! and see how the kindred soul clasps wildly to the kindred soul, and clings to him with tears and sobs and a full,

full heart, as to a fallen brother, whose fall, it may be, but prophesies his own! No man has written of Burns as Carlyle has: and he has written so that future peers of Burns will bow the knee in thankfulness, for the piercing words and the admonitory finger.

Open now at the Taylor of Norwich! The peculiarity of Carlyle's criticism is, that he cares little for a man's works as ends. He looks on them only as means-only as windows, whereto having clomb, he can thrö them see the man within, and his whole house and ongoings. He has got an itching actually to ken what kind of body he was at all that wrote all these fine words. As he says himself, he construes always the man from the book. Now, this is a step altogether new and unprecedented in literary history; and Criticism now and hence forth is for ever altered by it. This is what faint-praisers' mean by Carlyle's having “fostered a more penetrative spirit of criticism among us."

Well, just see how successfully he has done this with this Taylor of Norwich! You cannot help seeing the big-boned man that had lots of 'kneed timber' in him; and you are amused at the manner in which he is made to show his paces. It is a literary hunt-it is the most perfect piece of literary TROTTING (to use a vulgar phrase) we have yet seen; and we split our sides with laughter; but we respect and love the man.

Or, leaving his English portraits, let us take his foreign ones, wherein, from your extensive experience in travel and language, you ought to be quite as much at home as Carlyle. But you are not so; and, after all, you will not understand your Tiecks and Hoffmans and Richters and Schillers and Goethes till you use the lens of this great Scotchman.

Take up the Heyne to begin with. What noble incitements to bravery, and battle, and long-enduring patience! Style! What is style? what do you call style? Is not this style? Best words, best placed: that probably is style. Well, look at this: are not these the best words best placed? Why, it is as limpid and serene, but stronger far than any Hume or Goldsmith of them all. And is not the Johnson so-and the Burns-and the whole of them? Look to his Voltaire! Here for you is the very model of an Essay. It is but a reviewbut an article in a periodical-and you know, as well as I do, what, in general, that is, and the petty stuff it is huddled up with: but this seems the condensed virtue of many volumes. The writer appears here to have arrived at the ultimate and essential drop, orbed and lucid. Whole years of gathering materials-whole years of licking them into shape, selecting and rejecting and concentrating-must have preceded this grand chemistry. The subject seems to have been ruminated and digested for an age: it issues-whole. It is not in parts-it is moltenit is fused-it is perfect and complete-it is one and indivisible-one, even as a statue is the finished out-come of the womb of art. Voltaire, his being and his doings-Voltaire and his whole work-are set down before you in a lump. Nothing has escaped the analyst; he has penetrated everywhere; nor overlooked a corner. It becomes at length like a coup d'oeil to you—the human figure in the centre-his realizations at his feet-his virtue and his vice on the right hand and the left. Style! It is like steel; swift, sure, trenchant-a blade that is of the ice-brook's temper, elastic and invincible.

It were pleasant for me to breathe over all these masterpieces-to revisit,