Carlyle’s essays for the next two years, chiefly on German literature, which he admired and sought to introduce to his countrymen, were published in various Reviews.  I can only allude to one on Richter, whose whimsicality of style he unconsciously copied, and whose original ideas he made his own.  In this essay Carlyle introduced to the English people a great German, but a grotesque, whose writings will probably never be read much out of Germany, excellent as they are, on account of the “jarring combination of parentheses, dashes, hyphens, figures without limit, one tissue of metaphors and similes, interlaced with epigrammatic bursts and sardonic turns,—­a heterogeneous, unparalleled imbroglio of perplexity and extravagance.”  There was another, on Schiller, not an idol to Carlyle as Goethe was, yet a great poet and a true man, with deep insight and intense earnestness.  “His works,” said Carlyle, “and the memory of what he was, will arise afar off, like a towering landmark in the solitude of the past, when distance shall have dwarfed into invisibility many lesser people that once encompassed him, and hid them forever from the near beholder.”

Thus far Carlyle had confined himself to biography and essays on German literature, in which his extraordinary insight is seen; but now he enters another field, and writes a strictly original essay, called “Characteristics,” published in the Edinburgh Review in the prolific year of 1831, in which essay we see the germs of his philosophy.  The article is hard to read, and is disfigured by obscurities which leave a doubt on the mind of the reader as to whether the author understood the subject about which he was writing,—­for Carlyle was not a philosopher, but a painter and prose-poet.  There is no stream of logic running consistently through his writings.  In “Characteristics” he seems to have had merely glimpses of great truths which he could not clearly express, and which won him the reputation of being a German transcendentalist.  Its leading idea is the commonplace one of the progress of society, which no sane and Christian man has ever seriously questioned,—­not an uninterrupted progress, but a general advance, brought about by Christian ideas.  Any other view of progress is dreary and discouraging; nor is this inconsistent with great catastrophes and national backslidings, with the fall of empires, and French Revolutions.

We note at this time in Carlyle’s writings, on the whole, a cheerful view of human life in spite of sorrows, hardships, and disappointments, which are made by Divine Providence to act as healthy discipline.  We see nothing of the angry pessimism of his later writings.  Those years at Craigenputtock were healthy and wholesome; he labored in hope, and had great intellectual and artistic enjoyment, which reconciled him to solitude,—­the chief evil with which he had to contend, after dyspepsia.  His habits were frugal, but poverty did not stare him in the face, since he had the income of the farm.  It does not appear that the deep gloom which subsequently came over his soul oppressed him in his moorland retreat.  He did not sympathize with any religion of denials, but felt that out of the jargon of false and pretentious philosophies would come at last a positive belief which would once more enthrone God in the world.