no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought.
But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own
impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in
the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his
arrogance there is no littleness,--no self-love. It is the heroic
arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror;--it is his nature, and
the untameable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons.
You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would
only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to
see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron
in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you
senselessly go too near.

"He seems, to me, quite isolated,--lonely as the desert,--yet never
was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match
his mood. He finds them, but only in the past. He sings, rather than
talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem,
with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning,
some singular epithet, which serves as a _refrain_ when his song is
full, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the
stitches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row.

"For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that
subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a
minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigour; for
all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morganas,
ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs
that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books,
is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his
point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I
cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it;--his works are
true, to blame and praise him,--the Siegfried of England,--great and
powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy
evil, than legislate for good."[A]

[Footnote A: "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." (Boston, 1852.) Vol.
iii., pp. 96-104.]

In 1848 Mr. Carlyle contributed a series of articles to the _Examiner_
and _Spectator_, principally on Irish affairs, which, as he has never
yet seen fit to reprint them in his Miscellanies, are apparently quite
unknown to the general public. With the exception