pose there is no writer in the world whose letters
and diaries are so full of cries of anguish and hopelessness. He was
crushed under the sense of the world's immensity; his own observation
was so microscopic, his desire to perceive and know so strong, his
appetite for definiteness so profound, that I feel that Carlyle's
terror was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, longing to
explore it all, lost in the high-flavoured dusk, and conscious of a
scale of mystery so vast that it humiliated a brain that wanted to know
the truth about everything. In these sad hours--and they were numerous
and protracted--he felt like a knight worn out by conflict, under a
listless enchantment which he could not break. I know few confessions
that are so filled with gleams of high poetry and beauty as many of
these solitary lamentations. But I believe that the terrors that
Carlyle had to face were the terrors of a swift, clear-sighted,
feverishly active, intuitive brain, prevented by mortal weakness and
frailty from dealing as he desired with the dazzling immensity and
intricacy of the world's life and history.

I feel no real doubt of this, because Carlyle's passion for accurate
and minute knowledge, his intense interest in temperament and
character, his almost unequalled power of observation--which is really
the surest sign of genius--come out so clearly all through his life,
that his finite limitations must have been of the nature of a torture
to him. One who desired to know the truth about everything so
vehemently, was crushed and bewildered by the narrow range and limited
scope of his own insatiable thought. His power of expressing all that
he saw and felt, so delicately, so humorously, and at times so
tenderly, must have beguiled his sadness more than he knew. It was
Ruskin who said that he could never fit the two sides of the puzzle
together--on the one side the awful dejection and despondency which
Carlyle always claimed to feel in the presence of his work, as a
dredger in lakes of mud and as a sorter of mountains of rubbish, and on
the other side the endless relish for salient traits, and the delighted
apprehension of quality which emerges so clearly in all he wrote.

But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though never
unutterably. He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of
putting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness was
a disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything defin