But the venture turn'd out a lucky one,
and there was no emigration.
Carlyle's work in the sphere of literature as he commenced and carried
it out, is the same in one or two leading respects that Immanuel
Kant's was in speculative philosophy. But the Scotchman had none of
the stomachic phlegm and never-perturb'd placidity of the Konigsberg
sage, and did not, like the latter, understand his own limits, and
stop when he got to the end of them. He clears away jungle and
poisonvines and underbrush--at any rate hacks valiantly at them,
smiting hip and thigh. Kant did the like in his sphere, and it was all
he profess'd to do; his labors have left the ground fully prepared
ever since--and greater service was probably never perform'd by mortal
man. But the pang and hiatus of Carlyle seem to me to consist in
the evidence everywhere that amid a whirl of fog and fury and
cross-purposes, he firmly believ'd he had a clue to the medication of
the world's ills, and that his bounden mission was to exploit it.[15]
There were two anchors, or sheet-anchors, for steadying, as a last
resort, the Carlylean ship. One will be specified presently. The
other, perhaps the main, was only to be found in some mark'd form of
personal force, an extreme degree of competent urge and will, a man
or men "born to command." Probably there ran through every vein and
current of the Scotchman's blood something that warm'd up to this kind
of trait and character above aught else in the world, and which
makes him in my opinion the chief celebrater and promulger of it in
literature--more than Plutarch, more than Shakspere.
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