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
range and limited scope of his own insatiable thought. His power of
expressing all that he saw and felt, so delicately, so humorously,
and at times so tenderly, must have beguiled his sadness more than
he knew. It was Ruskin who said that he could never fit the two
sides of the puzzle together--on the one side the awful dejection
and despondency which Carlyle always claimed to feel in the
presence of his work, as a dredger in lakes of mud and as a sorter
of mountains of rubbish, and on the other side the endless relish
for salient traits, and the delighted apprehension of quality which
emerges so clearly in all he wrote.

But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though never
unutterably. He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of
putting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness
was a disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything definite--
for he never even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him--but
a nightmare dream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a