women that inhabit a kingdom. The soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home. 25 August 1819. How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not "babble," I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. 16 February 1820. THOMAS CARLYLE 1795-1881 FRANCE AROUSED YE have roused her, then, ye Emigrants and Despots of the world; France is roused! Long have ye been lecturing and tutoring this poor Nation, like cruel uncalled-for pedagogues, shaking over her your ferules of fire and steel; it is long that ye have pricked and filliped and affrighted her, there as she sat helpless in the dead cerements of a Constitution, you gathering in on her from all lands, with your armaments and plots, your invadings and truculent bullyings; and lo now, ye have pricked her to the quick, and she is up, and her blood is up. The dead cerements are rent into cobwebs, and she fronts you in that terrible strength of Nature, which no man has measured, which goes down to Madness and Tophet: see now how ye will deal with her. This month of September 1792, which has become one of the memorable months of History, presents itself under two most diverse aspects; all of black on the one side, all of bright on the other. Whatsoever is cruel in the panic frenzy of Twenty-five million men, whatsoever is great in the simultaneous death-defiance of Twenty-five million men, stand here in abrupt contrast, near by one another. As indeed is usual when a man, how much more when a Nation of men, is hurled suddenly beyond the limits. For Nature, as green as she looks, rests everywhere on dread foundations, were we farther down; and Pan, to whose music the Nymphs dance, has a cry in him. that can drive all men distracted. French Revolution, vol. III. 1, i. DEATH OF PRINCE HENRY, SON OF JAMES I HE lies there, a beautiful ideal youth, consecrated by the tears and sorrowful heart worship of all the world. The Lord Mayor's feast is sorrowfully clouded; - all feasts are sorrowfully clouded: broad Anne of Denmark weeps once more from the bottom of her Mother's heart as she hoped never to have done; paternal Majesty does not weep, but his thoughts, I believe, go wandering over Time and over Eternity, over Past and Present, in a restless, arid, vague, still more tragic manner, and discern at glimpses what a sorry Rag-fair of a business this of Life and its Eloquences is: - what a frivolous playactor existence we have at Whitehall here, with the Furies looking through the arras on us. Historical Sketches, pp. 95-96. COLERIDGE THE good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching, you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly and weightiest things. I still recollect his "object" and "subject," terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang and snuffled them into "om-m-mject" and "sum-mmject," with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be more surprising. Life of Stirling, I, viii. CARLYLE IN SCOTLAND ... My days pass along here, where a multiplicity of small things still detains but does not occupy me, in a most silent, almost sabbath-like manner. I see nobody; I do not even read much. The old hills and rivers, the old earth with her star firmaments and burial-vaults, carry on a mysterious, unfathomable dialogue with me. It is eight years since I have seen a spring, and in such a mood I never saw one. It seems all new and original to me- beautiful, almost solemn. Whose great laboratory is that? The hills stand snow-powdered, pale, bright. The black hailstorm awakens in them, rushes down like a black swift ocean tide, valley answering valley; and again the sun blinks out, and the poor sower is casting his grain into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiacs and far Heavenly Horologes have not faltered; that there will be yet another summer added for us and another harvest. Life in London, chap. ix. THE PIANO How the ear of man is tortured in this terrestrial planet! Go where you will, the cock's shrill clarion, the dog's harsh watch note, not to speak of the melody of jackasses, and on streets, of wheel-barrows, wooden clogs, loud-voiced men, perhaps watchmen, break upon the hapless brain; and, if all was not enough, the "Piety of the Middle Ages" has founded tremendous bells; and the hollow triviality of the present age far worse has everywhere instituted the piano! Why are not at least all those cocks and cockerels boiled into soup, into everlasting silence? Or, if the Devil, some good night, should take his hammer and smite in shivers all and every piano of our European world, so that in broad Europe there were not one piano left soundable, would the harm be great? Would not, on the contrary, the relief be considerable?... This miserable young woman that now in the next house to me spends all her young, bright days, not in learning to darn stockings, sew shirts, bake pastry, or any art, mystery, or business that will profit herself or others; not even in amusing herself or skipping on the grassplots with laughter of her mates; but simply and solely in raging from dawn to dusk, to night and midnight, on a hapless piano, which it is evident she will never in this world learn to render more musical than a pair of barn-fanners! The miserable young |