Order! Reducing! It is like
compelling the grave to give up its dead!"
Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of his own creation
to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of
subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of
the _Reminiscences_ touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely
relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole
strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few
visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding
on his horse Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), "during that book, some
30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under cloud of
night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day I sat,
silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and such work, _invitissima Minerva_,
for that matter." Mrs. Carlyle had her usual share of the sufferings
involved in "the awful _Friedrich_." "That tremendous book," she writes,
"made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory semblance of
home life or home happiness." But when at last, by help of Neuberg and of
Mr. Larkin, who made the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes
were in type (they appeared in autumn 1858), his wife hailed them in a
letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, my dear, what a magnificent
book this is going to be, the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and
sparkling as the _French Revolution_; compact and finished as _Cromwell_.
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