But while he
announces the malady, and scolds and raves about it, he himself, born
and bred in the same atmosphere, is a mark'd illustration of it.
Notes:
[13] It will be difficult for the future--judging by his books,
personal dissympathies, &c.,--to account for the deep hold this author
has taken on the present age, and the way he has color'd its method
and thought. I am certainly at a loss to account for it all as
affecting myself. But there could be no view, or even partial picture,
of the middle and latter part of our Nineteenth century, that did
not markedly include Thomas Carlyle. In his case (as so many others,
literary productions, works of art, personal identities, events,)
there has been an impalpable something more effective than the
palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have
a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for
sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us
see what they amount to--those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful
analyses of democracy--even from the most erudite and sincere mind of
Europe.
[14] Not the least mentionable part of the case, (a streak, it may
be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast their
gravity,) is that although neither of my great authorities during
their lives consider'd the United States worthy of serious mention,
all the principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day
collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: _Speculations for
the use of North America, and Democracy there with the relations
of the same to Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings
(encouragements too, and of the vastest,) from the Old World to the
New.
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