. She had
been delicately reared, and the hard life wore upon her health. Yet it
was here that the young couple established themselves, and here that
some of the young author's best works were written,--as the
"Miscellanies" and "Sartor Resartus." From here it was that he sent
forth those magnificent articles on Heyne, Goethe, Novalis, Voltaire,
Burns, and Johnson, which, published in the Edinburgh and other Reviews,
attracted the attention of the reading world, and excited boundless
admiration among students.

The earlier of these remarkable productions, like those on Burns and
Jean Paul Richter, were free from those eccentricities of style which
Carlyle persisted in retaining with amazing pertinacity as he advanced
in life,--except, again, in his letters to his wife, which are models of
clear writing.

The essay on "German Literature" appeared in the same year, 1827,--a
longer and more valuable article, a blended defence and eulogium of a
_terra incognita_, somewhat similar in spirit to that of Madame de
Stael's revelations twenty years before, and in which the writer shows
great admiration of German poetry and criticism. Perhaps no Englishman,
with the possible exceptions of Julius Hare and Coleridge,--the latter
then a broken-down old man,--had at that time so profound an
acquaintance as Carlyle with German literature, which was his food and
life during the seven years' retirement on his moorland farm. This essay
also was comparatively free from the involved, grotesque, but vivid
style of his later works; and it was religious in its tone. "It is
mournful," writes he, "to see so many noble, tender, and aspiring minds
deserted of that light which once guided all such; mourning in the
darkness because there is no home for the soul; or, what is worse,
pitching tents among the ashes, and kindling weak, earthly lamps which
we are to take for stars. But this darkness is very transitory. These
ashes are the soil of future herbage and richer harvests. Religion
dwells in the soul of man, and is as eternal as the being of man."

In this extract we see the optimism which runs through Carlyle's earlier
writings,--the faith in creation which is to succeed destruction, the
immortal hopes which sustain the soul. He believed in the God of
Abraham, and was as far from being a scoffer as the heavens are higher
than the earth. He had renounced historical Christianity, but he adhered
to its essential spirit.

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