The next seven years of Carlyle’s life were spent at the Scotch moorland farm of Craigenputtock, belonging to his wife’s mother, which must have contributed to his support.  How any brilliant woman, fond of society as Mrs. Carlyle was, could have lived contentedly in that dreary solitude, fifteen miles from any visiting neighbor or town, is a mystery.  She had been delicately reared, and the hard life wore upon her health.  Yet it was here that the young couple established themselves, and here that some of the young author’s best works were written,—­as the “Miscellanies” and “Sartor Resartus.”  From here it was that he sent forth those magnificent articles on Heyne, Goethe, Novalis, Voltaire, Burns, and Johnson, which, published in the Edinburgh and other Reviews, attracted the attention of the reading world, and excited boundless admiration among students.

The earlier of these remarkable productions, like those on Burns and Jean Paul Richter, were free from those eccentricities of style which Carlyle persisted in retaining with amazing pertinacity as he advanced in life,—­except, again, in his letters to his wife, which are models of clear writing.

The essay on “German Literature” appeared in the same year, 1827,—­a longer and more valuable article, a blended defence and eulogium of a terra incognita, somewhat similar in spirit to that of Madame de Stael’s revelations twenty years before, and in which the writer shows great admiration of German poetry and criticism.  Perhaps no Englishman, with the possible exceptions of Julius Hare and Coleridge,—­the latter then a broken-down old man,—­had at that time so profound an acquaintance as Carlyle with German literature, which was his food and life during the seven years’ retirement on his moorland farm.  This essay also was comparatively free from the involved, grotesque, but vivid style of his later works; and it was religious in its tone.  “It is mournful,” writes he, “to see so many noble, tender, and aspiring minds deserted of that light which once guided all such; mourning in the darkness because there is no home for the soul; or, what is worse, pitching tents among the ashes, and kindling weak, earthly lamps which we are to take for stars.  But this darkness is very transitory.  These ashes are the soil of future herbage and richer harvests.  Religion dwells in the soul of man, and is as eternal as the being of man.”

In this extract we see the optimism which runs through Carlyle’s earlier writings,—­the faith in creation which is to succeed destruction, the immortal hopes which sustain the soul.  He believed in the God of Abraham, and was as far from being a scoffer as the heavens are higher than the earth.  He had renounced historical Christianity, but he adhered to its essential spirit.