breathe, and
show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and
instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience
of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all
opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in
their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical
superiority--raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a
torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow
freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly
resistance in his thoughts. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed
to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows
not how to stop in the chase.

Carlyle indeed is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there
is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old
Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and the untamable impulse
that has given him power to crush the dragons. He sings rather than
talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem,
with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning,
some singular epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is
full, or with which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the
stitches, if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the
higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject
is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to
laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the
spirits he is driving before him as Fata Morgana,[18] ugly masks, in
fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem
to others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of
pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view,
and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I can not speak
more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to
blame and praise him--the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if
not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than
legislate for good.

[Footnote 18: Fata (a fairy) Morgana, sister of King Arthur, is a
leading figure in the "Morte d'Arthur" and other romances, including
Italian.]

HORACE GREELEY

Born in New Hampshire in 1811, died in 1872; came to New
York in 1831, where he edited the _Log Cabin_ during the
Harrison-Tyler campaign; in 1841 founded