But it is difficult to discern in all this what his endless and plangent melancholy was concerned with.  He had a very singular physical frame, immensely tough and wiry, with an imagination which emphasized and particularised every slight touch of bodily disorder.  When he was at work, he toiled like a demon day after day, entirely and vehemently absorbed.  When he was not at work he suffered from dreary reaction.  He fought out in early days a severe moral combat, and found his way to a belief in God which was very different from his former Calvinism.  Carlyle can by no stretch of the word be called a Christian, but he was one of the most thoroughgoing Deists that ever lived.  The terror that beset him in that first great conflict was a ghastly fear of his own insignificance, and a horrible suspicion that the world was made on fortuitous and indifferent lines.  His dread was that of being worsted, in spite of all his eager sensibility and immense desire to do a noble work, of being crushed, silenced, thrown ruthlessly on the dust-heap of the world.  He learned a fiery sort of Determinism, and a faith in the stubborn power of the will, not to achieve anything, but to achieve something.

Yet after this tremendous conflict, described in Sartor Resartus, where he found himself at bay with his back to the wall, he never had any ultimate doubt again of his own purpose.  Still, it brought him no serenity; and I suppose there is no writer in the world whose letters and diaries are so full of cries of anguish and hopelessness.  He was crushed under the sense of the world’s immensity; his own observation was so microscopic, his desire to perceive and know so strong, his appetite for definiteness so profound, that I feel that Carlyle’s terror was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, longing to explore it all, lost in the high-flavoured dusk, and conscious of a scale of mystery so vast that it humiliated a brain that wanted to know the truth about everything.  In these sad hours—­and they were numerous and protracted—­he felt like a knight worn out by conflict, under a listless enchantment which he could not break.  I know few confessions that are so filled with gleams of high poetry and beauty as many of these solitary lamentations.  But I believe that the terrors that Carlyle had to face were the terrors of a swift, clear-sighted, feverishly active, intuitive brain, prevented by mortal weakness and frailty from dealing as he desired with the dazzling immensity and intricacy of the world’s life and history.

I feel no real doubt of this, because Carlyle’s passion for accurate and minute knowledge, his intense interest in temperament and character, his almost unequalled power of observation—­which is really the surest sign of genius—­come out so clearly all through his life, that his finite limitations must have been of the nature of a torture to him.  One who desired to know the truth about everything so vehemently, was crushed and bewildered by the narrow