" Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between
the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the
human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem
to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me;
my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of
Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he
has called the poet's twin:
"He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the
future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was
denied the view from Pisgah."
Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic;
but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of
time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a
cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the
culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's
great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the
Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:--
Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance;
and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is
no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of
Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as
round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity
minutes are as years and aeons.
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