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