f purpose, of volition,
even of hostility; it was one huge and immeasurable steam-engine,
rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh,
the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death!" And then he
suddenly resolved to resist. Why go on trembling like a coward?--"As
I so thought, there rushed a stream of fire over my whole soul, and
I shook base fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown
strength; a spirit; almost a god: ever from that time the temper
of my misery was changed; not fear or whining sorrow was in it, but
indignation and grim, fell-eyed defiance." These are the phrases of
his imaginary hero in 'Sartor Resartus.' In the 'Reminiscences' he
repeats the statement in his own person. He had won "an immense
victory"; he had escaped from the "foul mud gods" and soared into the
"eternal blue of ether" where he had "for the spiritual part ever
since lived." He could look down upon his fellow creatures still
"weltering in that fatal element," "pitying the religious part of them
and indignant against the frivolous"; enjoying an inward and supreme
happiness which still remained to him, though often "eclipsed" in
later years.

To understand this crisis is to understand his whole attitude. The
change was not of the purely logical kind. Carlyle was not converted
by any philosophical system. Coleridge, not long before, had found in
Kant and Schelling an answer to similar perplexities. Carlyle, though
he respected the German metaphysicians, could never find their dogmas
satisfactory to his shrewd Scottish sense. His great helper, he tells
us, in the strait, was not Kant but Goethe. The contrast between that
serene prophet of culture and the rugged Scottish Puritan is so marked
that one may be tempted to explain the influence partly by personal
accident. Carlyle grew up at a time when the British public was just
awaking to the existence of Germany; and not only promoted the
awakening but was recognized by the great Goethe himself. He may well
have been inclined in later years to exaggerate a debt due to so
welcome a recognition. And yet it is intelligible that in Goethe,
Carlyle saw what he most required. A man of the highest genius and a
full representative of the most advanced thought could yet recognize
what was elevating in the past as clearly as what was the true line of
progress for us to pursue; and while casting aside the dead trappings
as decidedly as Carlyle, could reach seren