i, 1810-1850._= (Manual, p. 502.)

From "At Home and Abroad."

=_210._= CHARACTER OF CARLYLE.

Accustomed to the infinite wit and exhuberant richness of his writings,
his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with
steady eyes. He does not converse,--only harangues. It is the usual
misfortune of such marked men (happily not one invariable or inevitable)
that they cannot allow other minds room to 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 the least
from unwillingness to allow freedom to others; on the contrary, no
man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought; 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
or 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. You do not love him, perhaps, nor
revere, and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but
you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the
Siegfried, melting all the old iron, in his furnace till it glows to a
sunset red, and burns you if you senselessly go too near. He seemed to
me quite isolated, lonely as the desert; yet never was man more fitted
to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds such, but
only in the past. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind
of satirical, heretical, 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 drivi