nd an Obedience that makes us Free. The young spirit
has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time; as yet
Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean; years to
the child are as ages; ah! the secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or
quicker decay and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric,
from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in
a motionless Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling
Universe is forever denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair
Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou
too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles;
thou too, with old Arnauld, must say in stern patience: "Rest? Rest?
Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?" Celestial Nepenthe! though a
Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee
not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the
eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For, as yet, sleep and
waking are one: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and
everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if
in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no
fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stone fruit, of which the fewest can
find the kernel.'

Carlyle's pathos touches its most sombre mood when he is dwelling upon
the common incidents of daily life as painted on the background of
Eternity. In his '_Cromwell_,' he breaks forth in a beautiful meditation
while dealing with a commonplace reference in one of the letters of
Cromwell:--'Mrs St John came down to breakfast every morning in that
summer visit of the year 1638, and Sir William said grave grace, and
they spake polite devout things to one another, and they are vanished,
they and their things and speeches,--all silent like the echoes of the
old nightingales that sang that season, like the blossoms of the old
roses. O Death! O Time!'

Severe comment has been made upon Carlyle's attitude towards science.
There was this excuse for his contemptuous attitude--science in its
early days fell into the hands of Dryasdusts. So absorbed were these men
in analysing Nature, that they missed the sense of mystery and beauty
which is the essence of all poetry and all religion. In the hands of the
Dryasdusts, Nature was converted into a museum in which everything was
duly labelled. During the mania for ana