The Project Gutenberg EBook of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle

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Title: Past and Present

Author: Thomas Carlyle

Release Date: September 27, 2004 [EBook #13534]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAST AND PRESENT ***

Produced by Jake Jaqua

PAST AND PRESENT
By Thomas Carlyle

Appreciation by Ralph Waldo Emerson

First published 1843

THOMAS CARLYLE, born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, the son of a
stonemason. Educated at Edinburgh University. Schoolmaster for
a short time, but decided on a literary career, visiting Paris
and London. Retired in 1828 to Dumfriesshire to write. In 1834
moved to Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and died there in 1881.

INTRODUCTION
Being an appreciation from "The Dial" (July 1843)
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here is Carlyle's new poem, his _Iliad_ of English woes, to
follow his poem on France, entitled the _History of the French
Revolution._ In its first aspect it is a political tract, and
since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with
it. It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men,
groups and disposes them with a master's mind, and, with a heart
full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his
brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the
dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has
conversed much on these topics with such wisemen of all ranks and
parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until, such daily and
nightly meditation has grown into a great connection, if not a
system of thoughts; and the topic of English politics becomes
the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking,
recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels,
and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a
brave and just book, and not a semblance. "No new truth," say
the critics on all sides. Is it so? Truth is very old, but the
merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their
right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount,
whose eye not only sees det