That German literature, with which at this time Carlyle had been more or less acquainted for ten years, had done much to foster and develop his genius there can be no doubt; although the book which first created a storm in his mind, and awoke him to the consciousness of his own abundant faculty, was the “Confessions” of Rousseau,—­a fact which is well worthy of record and remembrance.  He speaks subsequently of poor Jean Jacques with much sympathy and sorrow; not as the greatest man of his time and country, but as the sincerest,—­a smitten, struggling spirit,—­

  “An infant crying in the night,
  An infant crying for the light,
  And with no language but a cry.”

From Rousseau, and his strange thoughts, and wild, ardent eloquence, the transition to German literature was easy.  Some one had told Carlyle that he would find in this literature what he had so long sought after,—­truth and rest,—­and he gladly learned the language, and addressed himself to the study of its masters; with what success all the world knows, for he has grafted their thoughts upon his own, and whoever now speaks is more or less consciously impregnated by his influence.  Who the man was that sent Carlyle to them does not appear, and so far as he is concerned it is of little moment to inquire; but the fact constitutes the grand epoch in Carlyle’s life, and his true history dates from that period.

It was natural that he should be deeply moved on his introduction to German literature.  He went to it with an open and receptive nature, and with an earnestness of purpose which could not fail to be productive.  Jean Paul, the beautiful!—­the good man, and the wise teacher, with poetic stuff in him sufficient to have floated an argosy of modern writers,—­this great, imaginative Jean Paul was for a long time Carlyle’s idol, whom he reverently and affectionately studied.  He has written a fine paper about him in his “Miscellanies,” and we trace his influence not only in Carlyle’s thought and sentiment, but in the very form of their utterance.  He was, indeed, warped by him, at one period, clear out of his orbit, and wrote as he inspired.  The dazzling sunbursts of Richter’s imagination, however,—­its gigantic procession of imagery, moving along in sublime and magnificent marches from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth,—­the array, symbolism, and embodiment of his manifold ideas, ceased in the end to enslave, though they still captivated Carlyle’s mind; and he turns from him to the thinkers who deal with God’s geometry, and penetrate into the abysses of being,—­to primordial Kant, and his behemoth brother, Fichte.  Nor does Hegel, or Schelling, or Schlegel, or Novalis escape his pursuit, but he hunts them all down, and takes what is needful to him, out of them, as his trophy.  Schiller is his king of singers, although he does not much admire his “Philosophical Letters,” or his “Aesthetic Letters.”  But his grandest modern man is the calm and plastic Goethe,