ton the moderns of the richest strains.
Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though
deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has
entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and
wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of
these times--the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the
first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of
details, into style. We have been civilising very fast, building
London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New
Holland and Oregon--and it has not appeared in literature; there
has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books.
Carlyle's style is the first emergence of all this wealth and
labour with which the world has gone with child so long. London
and Europe, tunneled, graded corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and
East and West Indies for dependencies, and America, with the
Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in
literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How like
an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the
continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a
symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first
experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned
to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again,
sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did it first, though
never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character
pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything
in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He
"shakes with his mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the
Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house
and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo
the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in
his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his
frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full
of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but
in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music.
Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with
meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to
return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now
as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the
horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Life