Now, as I have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants and claims.  The spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the preceding age, was re-discovered; and the first and immediate consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth.  “Man was born free,” cried Rousseau, with a conviction which swept all before it; “he has original, inalienable, and supreme rights against all things which can set themselves against him.”  And Rousseau’s countrymen believed him.  There was not a Sans-culotte amongst them all but held his head high, being creation’s lord; and history can scarcely show a parallel to their great burst of joy and hope, as they ran riot in their new-found inheritance, from which they had so long been excluded.  They flung themselves upon the world, as if they would “glut their sense” upon it.

                  “Expend
  Eternity upon its shows,
  Flung them as freely as one rose
  Out of a summer’s opulence."[A]

[Footnote A:_Easter Day_.]

But the very discovery that man is spirit, which is the source of all his rights, is also an implicit discovery that he has outgrown the resources of the natural world.  The infinite hunger of a soul cannot be satisfied with the things of sense.  The natural world is too limited even for Carlyle’s shoe-black; nor is it surprising that Byron should find it a waste, and dolefully proclaim his disappointment to much-admiring mankind.  Now, both Carlyle and Browning apprehended the cause of the discontent, and both endured the Byronic utterance of it with considerable impatience.  “Art thou nothing other than a vulture, then,” asks the former, “that fliest through the universe seeking after somewhat to eat, and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee?  Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe.”

                                 “Huntsman Common Sense
  Came to the rescue, bade prompt thwack of thong dispense
  Quiet i’ the kennel:  taught that ocean might be blue,
  And rolling and much more, and yet the soul have, too,
  Its touch of God’s own flame, which He may so expand
  ‘Who measured the waters i’ the hollow of His hand’
  That ocean’s self shall dry, turn dew-drop in respect
  Of all-triumphant fire, matter with intellect
  Once fairly matched."[A]

[Footnote A:_Fifine at the Fair_, lxvii.]

But Carlyle was always more able to detect the disease than to suggest the remedy.  He had, indeed, “a glimpse of it.”  “There is in man a Higher than love of Happiness:  he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness.”  But the glimpse was misleading, for it penetrated no further than the first negative step.  The “Everlasting Yea” was, after all, only a deeper “No!” only Entsagung, renunciation:  “the