ncere. Carlylism is the male of Byronism. It is
Byronism with thew and sinew, bass pipe and shaggy bosom. There is the
same grievous complaint against the time and its men and its spirit,
something even of the same contemptuous despair, the same sense of the
puniness of man in the centre of a cruel and frowning universe; but
there is in Carlylism a deliverance from it all, indeed the only
deliverance possible. Its despair is a despair without misery. Labour in
a high spirit, duty done, and right service performed in fortitudinous
temper--here was, not indeed a way out, but a way of erect living
within.

Against Byronism the ordinary moralist and preacher could really do
nothing, because Byronism was an appeal that lay in the regions of the
mind only accessible by one with an eye and a large poetic feeling for
the infinite whole of things. It was not the rebellion only in
_Manfred_, nor the wit in _Don Juan_, nor the graceful melancholy of
_Childe Harold_, which made their author an idol, and still make him one
to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of
it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of
Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's
work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a
sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part
showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the
universal forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness of his
achievement and endurance takes a complexion of greatness from the
vague immensity that surrounds and impalpably mixes with it.

Remember further, that while in Byron the outcome of this was rebellion,
in Carlyle its outcome is reverence, a noble mood, which is one of the
highest predispositions of the English character. The instincts of
sanctification rooted in Teutonic races, and which in the corrupt and
unctuous forms of a mechanical religious profession are so revolting,
were mocked and outraged, where they were not superciliously ignored, in
every line of the one, while in the other they were enthroned under the
name of Worship, as the very key and centre of the right life. The
prophet who never wearies of declaring that 'only in bowing down before
the Higher does man feel himself exalted,' touched solemn organ notes,
that awoke a response from dim religious depths, never reached by the
stormy wailings of the Byronic lyre