through nebulous mutterings.  Much has he helped the enfranchisement of the spirit.  Well do I remember the thirst wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly “Frazer,” to drink of the spiritual waters of “Sartor Resartus.”  Here was a new spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, purifying draughts, did it bubble and sparkle!  That picture, in the beginning, of the “doing and driving (Thun und Treiben)” of a city as beheld by Professor Teufelsdroeckh from his attic—­would one have been surprised to read that on a page of Shakespeare?

A marvelous faculty of speech has Mr. Carlyle; a gift of saying what he has to say with a ring in the words that makes the thought tingle through your ears.  His diction surrounds itself with a magnetic aura, which seems to float it, to part it from the paper, it stands out in such transparent chiar-oscuro.  Common phrases he refreshes by making them the vehicle for new meanings, and in the ordering of words he has command of a magical logic.  The marrowy vigor in his mind it is that lends such expressiveness, such nimbleness, such accent to his sentences, to his style.

Mr. Carlyle’s power comes mainly from his sensibilities.  Through them he is poetical; through them there is so much light in his pages.  More often from his than from any others, except those of the major poets, breaks the sudden, joyful beam that flames around a thought when it knows itself embraced by a feeling.  Of humor and of wit, what an added fund does our language now possess through his pen.  The body of criticism, inclosed in the five volumes of Miscellanies, were enough to give their author a lasting name.  When one of these papers appeared in the Edinburgh, or other review, it shone, amid the contributions of the Jeffreys and Broughams, like a guinea in a handful of shillings.

The masterpiece of Mr. Carlyle, and the masterpiece of English prose literature, is his “French Revolution,” a rhythmic Epic without verse.  To write those three volumes a man needs have in him a big, glowing heart, thus to flood with passionate life all the men and scenes of a momentous volcanic epoch; a lively, strong, intellectual vision he must have, to grasp in their full reality the multitudinous and diverse facts and incidents so swiftly begotten under the pulsation of millions of contentious brains; he needs a literary faculty finely artistic, creatively imaginative, to enrank the figures of such vast tumultuous scenes, to depict the actors in each, to present vividly in clear relief the rapid succession of eventful convulsions.  Outside of the choice achievements of verse, is there a literary task of breadth and difficulty that has been done so well?  A theme of unusual grandeur and significance is here greatly treated.