continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a
symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first
experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned
to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again,
sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did it first, though
never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character
pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything
in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He
"shakes with his mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the
Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house
and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo
the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in
his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his
frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full
of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but
in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music.
Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with
meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to
return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now
as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the
horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Life of Schiller (Lond. Mag., 1823-4), 1825, 1845. (Supplement
published in the People's Edition, 1873) Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship, 1824. Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry
(from the French of Legendre), 1824. German Romance, 1827.