tempered by a singular airiness of form and softness of environment; in a climate favourable to vegetation, the grey cliff, itself covered with lichens, shoots up through a garment of foliage and verdure; and white, bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster round the everlasting granite. Often, also, could I see the black Tempest marching in anger through the distance; round some Schreckhorn, as yet grim-blue, would the eddying vapour gather, and there tumultuously eddy, and flow down like a mad witch's hair; till, after a space, it vanished, and in the clear sunbeam your Schreckhorn stood smiling grim-white, for the vapour had held snow."

Carlyle had now served his apprenticeship to literature. In addition to the Life of Schiller he had published a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and more than one volume of tales from Jean Paul, Tieck, and other German authors. He had begun to write in the Edinburgh Review, and produced his memorable essay on Burns. But he had not yet given to the world anything so strongly stamped with his original genius as to mark him out as a great original among living writers. Such a work he produced at Craigen-Puttoch,-the name of it Sartor Resartus. It contains the essential facts of his spiritual history, the fundamental principles of his philosophy. I shall give some account of it in the next chapter, and shall close, for the present, with one of those few poems written by Carlyle before he settled finally to prose.

THE SOWER'S SONG.

Now hands to seed-sheet, boys,

We step and we cast; old Time's on wing;

And would ye partake of harvest's joys,

The corn must be sown in spring.

Fall gently and still, good corn,
Lie warm in thy earthy bed,
And stand so yellow some morn,
That beast and man may be fed.

Old Earth is a pleasure to see
In sunshiny cloak of red and green;
The furrow lies fresh; this year will be
As the years that are past have been.
Fall gently and still, &c.

Old Mother, receive this corn,

The seed of six thousand golden sires:
All these on thy kindly breast were born;
One more thy poor child requires.

Fall gently and still, &c.

Now steady and sure again,

And measure of stroke and step we keep;
Thus up and thus down we cast our grain;

Sow well, and you gladly reap.

Fall gently and still, &c.

There is true melody, as well as exquisite picturesqueness, in this little song. Carlyle was born a poet.

MR.

CHAPTER III.

SARTOR RESARTUS.

R. CARLYLE has never pledged himself to any formal system of philosophy, his ineradicable conviction being that it is impossible to sum up truth in any system framed by man, and that, if you train yourself to look at nature through the coloured spectacles of any one theory, however comprehensive, you will see falsely, partially, or superficially. One verified fact, he maintains, is worth a score of elaborately-constructed philosophies of the universe. Those men of science who sit in cross-legged complacency, and explain to you how, out of nebulous starvapours, colliding ærolites, or otherwise, solar systems originate and worlds are formed, call forth his keenest sarcasm. "I would beg to know," he cries, glaring into them with eyes of fiery scorn, "whether an order for a world is likely to come to your shop any morning.”

Nevertheless his thinking and his writing have from first to last been dominated by a few great thoughts or ideas, and these are discoverable in their purest form in the book composed by him amid the wilds of Galloway—the worldrenowned Sartor Resartus. I look upon this as one of the very few books produced in Great Britain in the present century deserving to be styled a true, original, and important contribution to metaphysics. It connects itself in a very interesting manner with Kant's speculations on space

and time, and with Sir William Hamilton's philosophy of the Infinite ; but it is distinctively Carlyle's, and cannot be claimed by the disciples either of Kant or of Hamilton.

The thought in this book has an affinity with pantheism, with which it was identified by John Sterling; but it is not necessarily pantheistic. The thesis, or proposition, which underlies it, from beginning to end, is that all matter and material things are but vesture, clothing, or visual appearance, of spirit. Let us not be startled by the seeming mysticism of this. It is either false, or it is perfectly simple and true. As I hold to be the case with all genuine metaphysics, the proposition carries its own evidence with it, which evidence, if we will but make the effort of patient care necessary to comprehend it—and such an effort is surely worth making, in order to get at the deepest root of thought and belief in a mighty intellectual genius like Carlyle—we can estimate for ourselves, saying at once whether we agree with it or disagree. Matter, as such, he holds to be dead. That is to say, he finds in the universe, as revealed to him by his senses, or conceived by his mind, no matter which itself originates force, or which is a self-originating force. Do you and I, reader, agree with him here? Does a stone sink, or a cork rise, in water, by its own force? Does a magnet originate its own force? For my part, I do not know matter at all,-I cannot conceive or think of matter, except as inert, dead. Do we, then, know force at all? Carlyle answers Yes. When he stretches forth his hand, he initiates force. Even Professor Tyndall explicitly allows that his will determines the movement of his arm; and Carlyle, and those who hold with Carlyle that spirit is the only force-originating agency revealed to us either in experience or in consciousness, can challenge all the materialists in the world to name an instance in

The God-revealing Miracle.

17

which mere matter does what Professor Tyndall does when he moves his arm.

"The true, inexplicable, God-revealing miracle," writes Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, "lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free force to clutch aught therewith." How should this be a "Godrevealing miracle"? I am not sure that Carlyle explicitly answers the question; but we need not have much difficulty in supplying the answer which he suggests. The exertion of force by me reveals to me my own spirit; I am conscious of my own existence when I think, or feel, or act; I cannot do any of these things without, at the same time, becoming aware that I, the indefinable spirit or person who originate force, exist. I never think,-I cannot rationally think,-that my bones, my blood-vessels, the particles of my brain, in one word, any or all the material instruments which I set in motion, are the originating force within me. In like manner, seeing the material universe, from star to wave-spray, in motion, I conclude that the only cause known to me as adequate to originate motion, or to use matter as an instrument, is present in the universe, and is a Spirit,-God. Strictly, therefore, it is true, as Carlyle says, that the stretching forth of my hand is to me a natural revelation of God; and Professor Tyndall, when he acknowledged to his audience that the exertion of force by his will upon his arm was a primary, indisputable fact, ought, I humbly suggest, to have followed in the steps of Carlyle, and owned that such a fact attests the existence of a Living Spirit who moves the universe. But it requires immense courage in these days to utter and stand to any simple, great, and ancient truth; it is on paradox, extravagance, glittering superficiality, that the plaudits of the crowd are showered. All is dead save spirit-the spirit, man, the spirit, God:that is the fundamental doctrine of Mr. Carlyle, the kernel