“There was a man once,—­a satirist.  In the natural course of time his friends slew him and he died.  And the people came and stood about his corpse.  ’He treated the whole round world as his football,’ they said indignantly, ‘and he kicked it.’  The dead man opened one eye.  ‘But always toward the goal,’ he said.”

This goal toward which Carlyle struggled to drive humanity was the goal of moral achievement.  Young people on both sides of the Atlantic responded vigorously to his appeals.  The scientist John Tyndall said to his students:—­

“The reading of the works of two men has placed me here to-day.  These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson.  I must ever remember with gratitude that through three long, cold German winters, Carlyle placed me in my tub, even when ice was on its surface, at five o’clock every morning ... determined, whether victor or vanquished, not to shrink from difficulty...  They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral force...  They called out.  ‘Act!’ I hearkened to the summons.”

Huxley aptly defined Carlyle as a “great tonic,—­a source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus.”

Carlyle is not only a “great Awakener” but also a great literary artist.  His style is vivid, forceful, and often poetic.  He loves to present his ideas with such picturesqueness that the corresponding images develop clearly in the reader’s mind.  Impressive epithets and phrases abound.  His metaphors are frequent and forceful.  Mirabeau’s face is pictured as “rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled.”  In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of “the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed.”  He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, such as “mischief-joy”; and when he pleased, he coined new words, like “dandiacal” and “croakery.”

His frequent exclamations and inversions make his style seem choppy, like a wave-tossed sea; but his sentences are so full of vigor that they almost call aloud from the printed page.  His style was not an imitation of the German, but a characteristic form of expression, natural to him and to his father.

The gift of verse was denied him, but he is one of the great prose poets of the nineteenth century.  Much of Sartor Resartus is highly poetic and parts of The French Revolution resemble a dramatic poem.

JOHN RUSKlN, 1819-1900

[Illustration:  JOHN RUSKIN. From a photograph]

Life.—­The most famous disciple of Carlyle is John Ruskin, the only child of wealthy parents, who was born in London in 1819.  When he was four years old the family moved to Herne Hill, a suburb south of London, where his intense love of nature developed as he looked over open fields, “animate with cow and buttercup,” “over softly wreathing distances of domestic wood,” to the distant hills.  His entertaining autobiography, Praeterita (1885-1889), relates how he was reared:—­