" In the striking article in the _St.
James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who
had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable
men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the
most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most
forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles]
that general impression of genius and force of character which it is
impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin
and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _metier_,
his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement,
confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right
direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more
intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician,
declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge,
kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than
informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light,
like the Joethuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too
much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He
makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is
impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear
goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon.
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