And we forget because we must,
And not because we will."

The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate utterance to keep
alive in the minds of his countrymen a deep, abiding sense of life's
mystery, sacredness, and solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle
did for the moderns. In the whole range of modern literature, it is
impossible to match Carlyle's magnificent passages in _Sartor Resartus_,
in which, under a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal
emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form the warp and woof of
human life.

Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to those mechanical
scientists who imagine that Nature can be measured by tape-lines, and
duly labelled in museums:--

'System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature
remains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all
Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and
measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our little
fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us; but who knows what
deeper courses these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes)
our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble,
and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become
familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic
Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's eclipses; by all
which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time
(_un_miraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow
is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; his
Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence
through Aeons of Aeons. We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a
Volume it is,--whose Author and Writer is God.'

Agree or disagree with Carlyle's views of the Ultimate Reality as we
may, there can be nothing but harmony with the spirit which breathes in
the following:--

'Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou the "Living
Garment of God"? O Heavens, is it in very deed, He, then, that ever
speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves
in me?

'Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, and
Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than
Dayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice
to her little child that stray