The devil has his elect.

Is anything more wonderful than another, if you consider it maturely?  I have seen no men rise from the dead; I have seen some thousands rise from nothing.  I have not force to fly into the sun, but I have force to lift my hand, which is equally strange.

Is not every thought properly an inspiration?  Or how is one thing more inspired than another?

Examine by logic the import of thy life, and of all lives.  What is it?  A making of meal into manure, and of manure into meal.  To the cui bono there is no answer from logic.

In many ways Jane Welsh found the difference of range between Carlyle and Irving.  At one time, she asked Irving about some German works, and he was obliged to send her to Carlyle to solve her difficulties.  Carlyle knew German almost as well as if he had been born in Dresden; and the full and almost overflowing way in which he answered her gave her another impression of his potency.  Thus she weighed the two men who might become her lovers, and little by little she came to think of Irving as partly shallow and partly narrow-minded, while Carlyle loomed up more of a giant than before.

It is not probable that she was a woman who could love profoundly.  She thought too much about herself.  She was too critical.  She had too intense an ambition for “showing off.”  I can imagine that in the end she made her choice quite coolly.  She was flattered by Carlyle’s strong preference for her.  She was perhaps repelled by Irving’s engagement to another woman; yet at the time few persons thought that she had chosen well.

Irving had now gone to London, and had become the pastor of the Caledonian chapel in Hatton Garden.  Within a year, by the extraordinary power of his eloquence, which, was in a style peculiar to himself, he had transformed an obscure little chapel into one which was crowded by the rich and fashionable.  His congregation built for him a handsome edifice on Regent Square, and he became the leader of a new cult, which looked to a second personal advent of Christ.  He cared nothing for the charges of heresy which were brought against him; and when he was deposed his congregation followed him, and developed a new Christian order, known as Irvingism.

Jane Welsh, in her musings, might rightfully have compared the two men and the future which each could give her.  Did she marry Irving, she was certain of a life of ease in London, and an association with men and women of fashion and celebrity, among whom she could show herself to be the gifted woman that she was.  Did she marry Carlyle, she must go with him to a desolate, wind-beaten cottage, far away from any of the things she cared for, working almost as a housemaid, having no company save that of her husband, who was already a dyspeptic, and who was wont to speak of feeling as if a rat were tearing out his stomach.

Who would have said that in going with Carlyle she had made the better choice?  Any one would have said it who knew the three—­ Irving, Carlyle, and Jane Welsh.