" But this rede he did not reck.
"Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their
happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not
stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself.
Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into
his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him.
Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch
for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made
him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus
Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French
Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the
successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are
among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography.
Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must
endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of
the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle,
"in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by
a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with
himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any
one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required
all the world to be uncomfortable along with him.
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