arlyle's life, and his true
history dates from that period.

It was natural that he should be deeply moved on his introduction to
German literature. He went to it with an open and receptive nature,
and with an earnestness of purpose which could not fail to be
productive. Jean Paul, the beautiful!--the good man, and the wise
teacher, with poetic stuff in him sufficient to have floated an argosy
of modern writers,--this great, imaginative Jean Paul was for a long
time Carlyle's idol, whom he reverently and affectionately studied. He
has written a fine paper about him in his "Miscellanies," and we trace
his influence not only in Carlyle's thought and sentiment, but in the
very form of their utterance. He was, indeed, warped by him, at one
period, clear out of his orbit, and wrote as he inspired. The
dazzling sunbursts of Richter's imagination, however,--its gigantic
procession of imagery, moving along in sublime and magnificent marches
from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth,--the array, symbolism, and
embodiment of his manifold ideas, ceased in the end to enslave, though
they still captivated Carlyle's mind; and he turns from him to the
thinkers who deal with God's geometry, and penetrate into the abysses
of being,--to primordial Kant, and his behemoth brother, Fichte. Nor
does Hegel, or Schelling, or Schlegel, or Novalis escape his pursuit,
but he hunts them all down, and takes what is needful to him, out of
them, as his trophy. Schiller is his king of singers, although he does
not much admire his "Philosophical Letters," or his "Aesthetic
Letters." But his grandest modern man is the calm and plastic Goethe,
and the homage he renders him is worthy of a better and a holier
idol. Goethe's "Autobiography," in so far as it relates to his early
days, is a bad book; and Wordsworth might well say of the "Wilhelm
Meister," that "it was full of all manner of fornication, like the
crossing of flies in the air." Goethe, however, is not to be judged by
any fragmentary estimate of him, but as an intellectual whole; for he
represented the intellect, and grasped with his selfish and cosmical
mind all the provinces of thought, learning, art, science, and
government, for purely intellectual purposes. This entrance into, and
breaking up of, the minds of these distinguished persons was, however,
a fine discipline for Carlyle, who is fully aware of its value; and
whilst holding communion with these great men, who by their genius and
ins