SOURCE: "Ishmael as Prophet: Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Self-Expressive Basis of Carlyle's Art," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. XI, No. 1, Spring, 1969, pp. 705-32.

In the following essay, Delaura argues that the unity of Carlyle's lectures on heroes and hero-worship is based in Carlyle's attempt to identify the personal characteristics, message, and role of the prophet. Furthermore, Delaura suggest that at times Carlyle presented himself as a prophet.

No reader of Thomas Carlyle's lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, delivered in May 1840, has missed the crucial unifying theme of the possibility of "Prophecy" in the nineteenth century. Carlyle is guardedly optimistic as he glances at the achievement of Goethe, about whom he had written for two decades. If the prime quality of the prophet is his "vision of the inward divine mystery," then Goethe eminently qualifies; for under Goethe's "guise of a...