it seems to me that the saddest thing in this
world is to lose one's youthful enthusiasms. When you can keep these
fresh and strong, after years of contact with a selfish world, age
cannot touch you.

[Illustration: ARCHHOUSE, ECCLEFECHAN, DUMFRIESSHIRE THE
BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE--FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN THE POSSESSION
OF ALEXANDER CARLYLE, M.A. ON WHICH CARLYLE HAS WRITTEN A
MEMORANDUM TO SHOW IN WHICH ROOM HE WAS BORN]

In this appeal to all that is best and noblest in youth, Carlyle
stands unrivaled. He has far more heart, force and real warm blood
than Emerson, who saw just as clearly, but who could not make his
thought reach the reader. A course in Carlyle should be compulsory in
the freshman year at every college. If the lecturer were a man still
full of his early enthusiasms it could not fail to have rich results.
Take, for instance, those two chapters in _Past and Present_ that are
entitled "Happy" and "Labor." In a dozen pages are summed up all
Carlyle's creed. In these pages he declares that the only enduring
happiness is found in good, honest work, done with all a man's heart
and soul. And after caustic words on the modern craving for happiness
he ends a noble diatribe with these words, which are worth framing and
hanging on the wall, where they may be studied day by day:

Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor
paper-crown's tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting
Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her
veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness,
unhappiness; all that was but wages thou hadst; thou hast
spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin
of it remains with thee; it is all spent, eaten; and now thy
work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy
work!

_Sartor Resartus_ is very hard reading, but if you make up your mind
to go through it you will be repaid by many fine thoughts and many
noble passages of impassioned prose. Under the guise of Herr Diogenes
Teufelsdrockh, Carlyle tells the story of his early religious doubts,
his painful struggles that recall Bunyan's wrestlings with despair,
and his final entry upon a new spiritual life. He wrote to let others
know how he had emerged from the Valley of the Shadow of Pessimism
into the delectable Mountains of Faith. Carlyle was the first of his
day to proclaim the great truth that the spiritual life is far more
importa