ight seemed to apprehend the essential truth of things at a glance,
it is not wonderful that he should have been so merciless in his
denunciations of the mere logic-ability of English writers, as he
shows himself in the essays of that period. Logic, useful as it is, as
a help to reasoning, is but the dead body of thought, as Novalis
designates it, and has no place in the inspired regions where the
prophets and the bards reside.

Carlyle's fame, however, had not reached its culminating point when
Emerson visited him. The English are a slow, unimpressionable people,
not given to hasty judgments, nor too much nor too sudden praise;
requiring first to take the true altitude of a man, to measure him by
severe tests; often grudging him his proper and natural advantages and
talents, buffeting and abusing him in a merciless and sometimes an
unreasoning and unreasonable manner, allowing him now and then,
however, a sunbeam for his consolation, until at last they come to a
settled understanding of him, and he is generously praised and abused
into the sanctuary of their worthies. This was not the case, however,
at present, with Carlyle; for although he had the highest recognitions
from some of those who constitute the flower and chivalry of England,
he was far better known and more widely read in America than in his
own country. Emerson, then a young man, with a great destiny before
him, was attracted by his writings, and carried a letter of
introduction to him at Craigenputtock. "He was tall and gaunt, with a
cliff-like brow; self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers
of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with
evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor
which floated everything he looked upon." He is the same man, in his
best moods, in the year 1857, as he was in 1833. His person, except
that he stoops slightly, is tall, and very little changed. He is
thinner, and the once ruddy hues of his cheek are dying away like
faint streaks of light in the twilight sky of a summer evening. But he
is strong and hearty on the whole; although the excitement of
continuous writing keeps him in a perpetual fever, deranges his liver,
and makes him at times acrid and savage as a sick giant. Hence his
increased pugnacity of late,--his fierceness, and angry hammering of
all things sacred and profane. It is but physical and temporary,
however, all this, and does not affect his healthy and se