The
following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead
brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself
among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him,
melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire
amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have--
What is life? a thawing ice-board
On a sea with sunny shore.
Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the
passage, "Then begun the AEolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest
pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common
"reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness,
and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign
Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself.
Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating
his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays
were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and
perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round
him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is
good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from
Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between
him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better
qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other.
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