the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of
Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it
was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even the
thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful beauty
of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence, poetry,
deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn.

Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder {288} of whole
literatures is strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of
the language with a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn.
The concreteness and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced
by his enormous vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or
any other single writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the
crowning grace of simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also
fatigues.

Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any
special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a
moralist, of a practical, rather than a speculative, philosopher. "The
end of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been
able to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms
have been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic
age he has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience,
silence, and reverence. _Ehrfurcht_--reverence--the text of his
address to the students of Edinburgh University, in 1866, is the last
word of his philosophy.

In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809- ----), a young graduate of Cambridge,
published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages, entitled _Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, like the _Sleeping
Beauty_, _Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_,
were full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like
character, and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's
studies, or {289} exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few
sweet chords, but no aria. A number of them--_Claribel_, _Lilian_,
_Adeline_, _Isabel_, _Mariana_, _Madeline_--were sketches of women; not
character portraits, like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions
of temperament, of delicately, differentiated types of feminine beauty.
In _Mariana_, expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid, in Shakspere's
_Measure for Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed
an art then peculiar, but since gr