" In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:--
Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than
I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John
Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable
_fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty
was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not
reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like
Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent,
that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it
was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold
even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when
all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that
man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you
love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is
not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse
to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious
serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as
Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning.
Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle
was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple
in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand
touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator.
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