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ophy termed men." And in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray's poetry, "a laborious mosaic, through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace could be expected to look." Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to be, what is the critic's noblest office, an interpreter between new poets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed, to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. The interpreter was there, but he spoke not. Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would, have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear he had already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanity there was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlative singers. Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, to disabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken for harmony; to refresh, with clear streams from "the divine fountain," hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic "strong waters;" to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way to that higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparable function it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargement and the purification of consciousness in which themselves exult through the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolific sentiment. The gifted interpreter was dumb. Nay, he made diversions into Scotland and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctly before Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter better known to them. And it pleased him to write about "Corn-law rhymes." That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done, by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr. Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of "Goethe's Helena," which is a kind of episode in the second part of "Faust," and was first published as a fragment. This takes up more than sixty pages in the first volume of the "Miscellanies," about the half being translations from "Helena," which by no means stands in the front rank of Goethe's poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high artistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almost uncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for five years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, flushed w
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