Carlyle was matured in solitude.  Emerson found him, in the year 1833, on the occasion of his first visit to England, living at Craigenputtock, a farm in Nithsdale, far away from all civilization, and “no one to talk to but the minister of the parish.”  He, good man, could make but little of his solitary friend, and must many a time have been startled out of his canonicals by the strange, alien speeches which he heard.  It is a pity that this minister had not had some of the Boswell faculty in him, that he might have reported what we should all be so glad to hear.  Over that period of his life, however, the curtain falls at present, to be lifted only, if ever, by Carlyle himself.  Through the want of companionship, he fell back naturally upon books and his own thoughts.  Here he wrote some of his finest critical essays for the reviews, and that “rag of a book,” as he calls it, the “Life of Schiller.”  The essays show a catholic, but conservative spirit, and are full of deep thought.  They exhibit also a profoundly philosophical mind, and a power of analysis which is almost unique in letters.  They are pervaded likewise by an earnestness and solemnity which are perfectly Hebraic; and each performance is presented in a style decorated with all the costly jewels of imagination and fancy,—­a style of far purer and more genuine English than any of his subsequent writings, which are often marred, indeed, by gross exaggerations, and still grosser violations of good taste and the chastities of language.  What made these writings, however, so notable at the time, and so memorable since, was that sincerity and deep religious feeling of the writer which we have already alluded to.  Here were new elements introduced into the current literature, destined to revivify it, and to propagate themselves, as by seminal vitality, in myriad minds and forms.  These utterances were both prophetic and creative, and took all sincere minds captive.  Dry and arid in comparison as Egyptian deserts, lay all around him the writings of his contemporaries.  No living waters flowed through them; all was sand, and parch, and darkness.  The contrast was immense:  a living soul and a dead corpse!  Since the era of the Commonwealth,—­the holy, learned, intellectual, and earnest age of Taylor, Barrow, Milton, Fuller,—­no such pen of fire had wrought its miracles amongst us.  Writers spoke from the intellect, believed in the intellect, and divorced it from the soul and the moral nature.  Science, history, ethics, religion, whenever treated of in literary form, were mechanized, and shone not with any spiritual illumination.  There was abundance of lawyer-like ability,—­but of genius, and its accompanying divine afflatus, little.  Carlyle is full of genius; and this is evidenced not only by the fine aroma of his language, but by the depths of his insight, his wondrous historical pictures,—­living cartoons of persons, events, and epochs, which he paints often in single sentences,—­and the rich mosaic of truths with which every page of his writings is inlaid.