e gout parvient a tirer une figure une et consistante de ce qui
ne me parait a moi meme dans mon souvenir que le cours d'un long
fleuve qui va s'epandant un pen au hazard des pentes et desertant
continuellement ses rives. De tels portraits comme celui que vous
voulez bien m'offrir me rendent un point d'appui et me feraient
veritablement croire a moi-meme. Et quand je songe a l'immense
quantite d'esprits auxquels vous me presentez sous un aspect si
favorable et si magistral dans ce nouveau monde de tant de jeunesse et
d'avenir, je me prends d'une sorte de fierte et de courageuse
confiance comme en presence deja de la posterite.

"Le mal auquel vous voulez bien vous interesser est tout simplement
une hypertrophie de la prostate. Les souffrances ne sont pas vives,
mais l'incommodite est grande, ne pouvant supporter a aucun degre le
mouvement de la voiture, ce qui restreint ma vie sociale a un bien
court rayon.

"Veuillez agreeer, cher Monsieur, l'assurance de ma cordiale
gratitude, et de mes sentiments les plus distingues.

SAINTE-BEUVE."

VI.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

A brain ever aglow with self-kindled fire--a cerebral battery
bristling with magnetic life--such is Thomas Carlyle. Exceptional
fervor of temperament, rare intellectual vivacity, manful
earnestness--these are the primary qualifications of the man. He has
an uncommon soul-power. Hence his attractiveness, hence his influence.
Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, throbs with his own
being. Themselves all authors put, of course, more or less, into what
they write: few, very few, can make their sentences quiver with
themselves. This Mr. Carlyle does by the intenseness of a warm
individuality, by the nimble vigor of his mental life, and, be it
added, by the rapture of his spirituality. The self, in his case, is a
large, deep self, and it sends an audible pulse through his pen into
his page.

To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties,
of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to which
these are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes the
difference between a genius and a blockhead. There being high vital
pressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mental
currents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends on
individual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, a
Dante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, with
all her generosity, being jeal