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