M'VR ^.1 tDITED BY ANN BACHELOR LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Chap. Copyright No JShelf-._e_13 ^ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Thomas Carl^le. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK SELECTIONS FROM THOMAS CARLYLE FOR EVERY DAY IN THE YEAR COMPILED AND EDITED BY ANN BACHELOR " Tf his every sentence was laden with intellect, it was still more heavily laden with character."— iV^w^// Dwight Hillisy D.D. BOSTON JAMES H. EARLE, PUBLISHER 178 Washington Street L.iV>r«py of Congress Iwu Copies RECEtveo DEC 8 1900 ^ Copynght wtry SECOND COPY OHOtH DIVISION DEC 10 I9UU No ^V^ \ T- 'V % ■r^ 8^ # i* Copyright, igoo, By JAMES H. EARl-E. All Ris^ds Reserved. ro ^ \2 ."^G c 1 V c ^ Jf r I c n D THIS L I T T I. K BOOK IS TENDERLY DEDICATED. Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I too late Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. —Ralph Waldo Emerson. January* Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file. Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I too late Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. —Ralph Waldo Emerson. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. January i. So here hath been dawning Another blue Day ; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away ? Out of Eternity This new day is born ; Into Eternity At night shall return. Behold it aforetime No eyes ever did ; So soon it forever From all eyes is hid. Here hath been dawning Another blue Day ; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away ? CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. January 2. O Time ! Time ! how it brings forth and devours ! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on, forever similar, forever changing ! January 3. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yester- day and To-morrow both are. January 4. Oh, it is great, and there is no other greatness, to make some work of God's creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God ; to make some human heart a little wiser, manfuller, happier— more blessed, less accursed ! January 5. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you. January 6. The great man's sincerity is the kind he cannot speak of: nay, I suppose, he is con- 8 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. scious rather of ^V/sincerity ; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day ? No, the great man does not boast himself sincere, far from that, perhaps does not ask himself if he is so : I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere! The great fact of existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this reality. His mind is so made ; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as life, real as death, is this universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the flamc-imagc glares upon him, undeniable, there, there ! January 7. In all true works of Art wilt thou discern Eternity looking through time ; the God- like rendered visible. January 8. Habit is the deepest law of human nature. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. It is our supreme strength, if also, in cer- tain circumstances, our miserable weakness. Let me go once, scanning my way with any earnestness of outlook, and, successfully ar- riving, my footsteps are an invitation to me a second time to go by the same way ; — it is easier than any other way. Habit is our primal fundamental law, — habit and imita- tion, — there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working and all apprenticeship, of all practical and all learning in the world. January 9. Not how much chaff is in you ; but whether you have any wheat. January 10. The healthy body is good, but the soul in right health is the thing beyond all others to be prayed for, the blessedcst thing this earth receives of heaven. January ii. It is a high, solemn, almost awful, thought for every individual man that his earthly lO CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. influence, \\hich has had a commencement, will never, through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end. January 12. There needs not a great soul to make a hero ; there needs a God-created soul which will be true to its origin ; that will be a great soul. January 13. The strong man will find ivork, which means difficulty, pain, to the full measure of his strength. January 14. Thy life is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thy own ; it is all thou hast to front Eternity with. January 15. God made the soul of man. He did not doom any soul of man to live as a Hy- pothesis and Hearsay, in a world filled with such, and the fatal work of such ! CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. ii January i6. The writer of a book, is not he a Preacher, preaching not to this parish or that, in this day or that, but to all men in all times and places ? January 17. Manhood begins when we have in any- way made truce with necessity ; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to necessity, and felt that in necessity we are free. January 18. I SHOULD say sincerity, a deep, great, gen- uine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. January 19. Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God's name ! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with 12 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. it, then. Up, up ! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day ; for the night Cometh, wherein no man can work. January 20. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this : To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for. January 21. May we not again say, that in the huge mass of evil, as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working imprisoned ; work- ing toward deliverance and triumph ? January 22. Foolish men mistake transitory sem- blances for eternal fact, and go astray more and more. January 23. No nobler feeling than this, of admira- tion for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man ; — It is to this hour, and CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 13 at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. January 24. Nothing ever happens but once in this v/orld. ■ What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning. January 25. There is always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works. In idleness alone is there perpetual despair. January 26. Not one false man but does unaccount- able mischief. January 27. The tendency to persevere, to persist in spite of hindrances, discouragements, and impossibilities— it is this that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak. January 28. I HAVE always found that the honest 14 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. truth of our own mind has a certain at- traction for every other mind that loves truth honestly. January 29. Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into conduct. January 30. Evil once manfully fronted ceases to "be evil, there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery ; the evil itself has become a kina of good. January 31. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Firm braced I sought my ancient woods, Struggling through the drifted roads ; The whited desert knew me not, Snow-ridges masked each darHng spot. Eldest mason, Frost, had piled Swift cathedral in the wild, The piney hosts were sheeted ghosts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 15 1 6 CARL VLB YEAR-BOOK. February i. Don't object that your duties are so in- significant ; they are to be reckoned of in- finite significance, and alone important to you. Were it but the more perfect regula- tion of your apartments, the sorting away of your clothes and trinkets, the arranging of your papers, — whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might, and all thy worth and constancy. Much more if your duties are of evidently higher, wider scope ; if you have brothers, sisters, a father, a mother, weigh earnestly what claim does lie upon you, on behalf of each, and consider it, as the one thing needful to pay them more and more, honestly and nobly, what you owe. What matter how miserable one is if one can do that ; that is the sure and steady disconnection and extinction of what- ever miseries one has in this world. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. February 2. The eye of the intellect sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing. February 3. Perhaps there is no other knowledge but that which is got by working ; the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge ; a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vor- tices, till we try to fix it. February 4. Beautiful it is to understand and know that a thought did never die; that, as thou, the originator thereof, hast gathered it and created it from the whole Past, so thou wilt transmit to the Avhole Future. It is thus that the heroic heart, the seeing eye of the first times, still feels and sees in us ot the latest : that the wise man stands ever encom- passed, and spiritually entranced by a cloud of witnesses and brothers, and there is a living literal communion of saints, wide as the world itself, and as the history of the world. 2 i8 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. February 5. From the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest height ; and for the poor also a Gospel has been published. February 6. I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it. February 7. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life which they are henceforth to rule. February 8. Does like join like ? Does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its em- broilment becomes order? Can the man say, fiat lux^ let there be light ; and out of chaos make a world ? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. FEBRUARY 9. If hero means sincere many why may not every one of us be a hero ? February 10. Cast forth thy act, thy word, into the ever-living, ever-working universe : it is a seed — given that cannot die; unnoticed to- day, it will be found flourishing as a banyan grove, perhaps, also, as a hemlock forest, after a thousand years. February ii. A MAN shall and must be valiant ; he must march forward and quit himself like a man — trusting imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper powers ; and, in the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory over fear will determine how much of a man he is. February 12. Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world. 20 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. February 13. The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem. February 14. Man's actions here are of infinite mo- ment to him, and never die or end at all. Man with his little life reaches upward high as heaven, — downward low as hell ; and in his three score years of time holds an eter- nity, fearfully and wonderfully hidden. February 15. Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand pros- perity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity. February 16. The thing which is deepest-rooted in nature, what we call truest, that thing, and not the other, will be found growing at last. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 21 February 17. Our thoughts, good or bad, are not in our command, but every one of us has at all hours duties to do ; and these we do negligently, like a slave, or faithfully, like a true servant. " Do the duty that is nearest thee " — that the first, and that well : all the rest will disclose themselves with increasing clearness, and make successive demand. Were your duties never so small, I advise you, set yourself with double and treble energy and punctuality, to do them., hour after hour, day after day. February 18. We are the miracle of miracles — the great inscrutable mystery of God. We cannot understand it, w^e know not how to speak of it ; but we may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so. 'February 19. Thou art not alone, if thou have Faith. 22 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. February 20. Work is of a religious nature : — work is of a brave nature: which it is the aim of re- ligion all to be. All work of man is as the summers, a waste ocean threatens to devour him ; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its con- queror along. February 21. Men cannot live isolated ; we are all bound together, for mutual good or else for mutual misery, as living nerves in the same body. February 22. The true past departs not ; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die, but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless changes. February 23. A WORD spoken in season, at the right mo- ment, is the matter of ages. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 23 February 24. The weakest living creature, by concen- trating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by his dispensing over many, may fail to ac- complish anything. The drop, by contmu- ally falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind. Februarv 25. My friend, all speech and humor are short- lived, foolish, untrue. Genuine work done what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal ! Take courage, then; raise the arm, strike home, and that right lustily ; the citade of hope must yield to noble desire, thus seconded by effort. Februarv 26, Great souls are always loyally submis- sive, reverent to what is over them ; only small, mean souls are otherwise. 24 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. February 27. This is such a serious world that we should never speak at all unless we had something to say. February 28. Over the times thou hast no power — to redeem a world sunk in dishonesty has not been given to thee. Solely over one man therein thou hast a quite absolute, uncon- trollable power. Him redeem and make honest. /Iftarcb^ Winters know Easily to shed the snow. And the untaught Spring is wise In cowslips and anemones. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 25 26 CARL VLB YEAR-BOOK. March i. All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account ; strictly taken, is not there at all ; matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some idea, and body it forth. On the other hand, all emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of Clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done and been. The whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing ; and the es- sence of all Science lies in the Philosophy of Clothes. March 2. In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time ; the articulate, audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 27 March 3. To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. March 4. What a wretched thing is all fame ! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years, and then ? Why then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity ; not the meager rhetorical eternity of the periodical cities, but for the real eternity wherewith dwelleth the Divine. March 5. Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one ; and there are certainly many more whose history deserves to be recorded than those able and willing to furnish the record. March 6. One of the Godlike things in this world is the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men. 28 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. March 7. Give us, O give us, the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time — he will do it better — he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their sphere. March 8. Readers are not aware of the fact, but a fact it is of daily increasing magnitude, and already of terrible importance to readers, that their first grand necessity in reading is to be vigilantly, conscientiously select I And to know everywhere that books, like human souls, are actually divided into what we call "sheep and goats," — the latter put inexorably on the left hand of the Judge; and tending, every goat of them, at all mo- ments, wdiither we know, and much to be avoided, and if possible ignored, by all creatures. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 29 March 9. Everywhere the human soul stands be- tween a hemisphere of light and another of darkness ; on the confines of two everlastino- hostile empires — Necessity and Free Will. March 10. Genuine work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder Himself. March ii. He who has battled with poverty and hard toil will be found stronger and more expert than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the provision wagons, or unwatchfully abiding by the stuff. March 12. Midas longed for gold. He got it, so that whatever he touched became gold, and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it. March 13. Fame is no sure test of merit, but only a 3° CARLYLR YEAR-BOOK. probability of such ; it is an accident, not a property, of man. March 14. Learn to be good readers, which is per- haps a more difificult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best at- tention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in, — a real, not an imaginary, — and which you will find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. March 15. The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells in silence — the sphere mel- ody, the melody of health. March 16. Every noble work is at first impossible. March 17. A MAN with a half-volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road ; a man with a whole vo- lition advances in the roughest, and will CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 31 reach his purpose, if there be even a little wisdom in it. March 18. Only in a world of sincere men is unity possible — and there, in the long run, it is as good as certain. March 19. Let a man try faithfully, manfully, to be right, he will daily grow more and more rii^ht. It is at the bottom of the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves. March 20. The true epic of our times is not " arms and the man," but "tools and the man," an infinitely wider kind of epic. March 21. Were he ever so benighted and forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works. 32 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. INIaRCH 22. A LAUGH, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness there can be no true joy. March 23. A COUNTRY which has no national h'tera- ture, or a Hterature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be, to its neigh- bors at least, in every important spiritual re- spect, an unknown and unestimated country. March 24. Liberty ? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consists in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, and to walk therein. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able for; and then, by permission, to set about doing of the same ! Tiiat is his true blessedness, honor, '* liberty," and maximum of well- being : if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 33 March 25. The right of private judgment will sub- sist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. March 26. Labor is discovered to be the grand con- queror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles. March 27. A HERO is a hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all. March 28. Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, en- listed under heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of darkness and wronsr? March 29. Who will begin the long, steep journey with us ? Or is there none : no one that can dare? We will not think so. 3 34 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. March 30. Love not pleasure ; love God. This is the everlasting yea, wherein all contradic- tion is solved ; Avhcrein whoso walks and works, it is well with him. March 31. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? HpdU April cold with dripping rain, Willows and lilacs bring again The whistle of returnino- birds o And trumpet lowing of the herds; The scarlet maple-keys betray What potent blood hath modest May. What fairy face the earth renews The wealth of fame, the flush of hues ; What joy in rosy waves outspread Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 35 36 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. April i. What great laboratory is this ? 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 Zodiac and far Heavenly Horologues have not fal- tered ; and that there will be yet another summer added for us and another harvest. Our whole heart asks with Napoleon : '' Messieurs, who made all that ? Be silent, foolish Messieurs ! " Aprii. 2. There is a mystery about nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 37 ApriIv 3. Literature is the thought of thinking souls. Aprii. 4. True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart ; it is not con- tempt, its essence is love ; it issues not in laughter, but in smiles, which lie far deeper. It is a sort of immense sublimity exalting, as it were, into our affections, what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our af- fections what is above us. Aprii. 5. Cant is itself properly a double-distilled lie, the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, and abom- inations body themselves, and from which no true thing can come. Aprii. 6. To-day is not yesterday. We ourselves change. How, then, can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fit- 38 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. test, continue always the same ? Change, indeed, is painful, yet ever needful ; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope. Aprii, 7 THE BOOK OF jv._.. I CALL that, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a noble universality, dif- ferent from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble Book ; all men's Book ! It is our first, oldest statement of the never- ending Problem, — man's destiny and God's ways with him here in this earth. And all in such free-flowing outlines ; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity, in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart, So true every way ; true eyesight and vision for all things ; material things no less than spiritual. The Horse, — '* hast thou clothed his neck with thunder ? " — " he laughs at CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 39 the shaking of the spear!" Such Uving likenesses were never since drawn. Sub- lime sorrow, sublime reconciliation ; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind ; so soft, and great— as the summer midnight ; as the world with its seas and stars ! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit. April 8. Is not God's Universe a symbol of the Godlike; is not Immensity a Temple; is not Man History and Men's History a per- petual Evangel? Listen, and for Organ- music thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the Morning Stars sing together. APRIIy 9. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate him- self under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, and the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be 40 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. reduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of man, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not hap- piness, but something higher ; one sees this even in the finless classes, with their *' point of honor," and the like. Not by flattering our appetites. No ; by awakening the heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any re- ligion gain followers. April io. One life ; a little gleam of time between two eternities ; no second chance for us for- ever more. APRIIv 12. One monster there is in this world — the idle man. Aprii. 13. Look up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 41 to man there would have been no heavens, and he would have laid himself down to his last sleep in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth vaulted over by a material arch— solid and impervious. Aprii. 14- Reform, like charity, must begin at home. Once well at home, how it will radiate out- wards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak and work ; kindling ever new light by incalculable contagion, spread- ing, in geometric ratio, far and wide, doing good only wherever it spreads, and not evil. Aprii< 15. • Oh, give us the man who sings at his work ! April 16. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining some- thing by him. He is the living-light foun- tain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world ; 42 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of heaven ; a flowing-light fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness — in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. ApriIv 17. In every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the ar- rival of a thinker in the world ? April 18. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure ; that is worship. Aprii. 19. No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve : it is his own inde- feasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there, by the grace of God alone ! CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 43 Aprii, 20. Custom doth make dotards of us all. Aprii. 21. A STAR is beautiful, it affords pleasure, not from what it is to do, or to give, but simply by being what it is. It befits the heavens ; it has congruity with the mighty space in which it dwells. It has repose : no force disturbs its eternal peace. It has freedom : no obstruction lies between it and infinity. Aprii, 22. Wondrous is the strength of cheerful- ness, altogether past calculation its power of endurance. Effects, to be permanently use- ful, must be uniformly joyous — a spirit all sunshine — graceful from very gladness— beautiful because bright. Aprii, 23. Many volumes have been written byway of commentary on Dante and his Book ; yet, on the whole, with no great result. . . . 44 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book, and, I might add, that portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me, it is a most touch- ing face, perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on va- cancy, with the simple laurel wound round it ; deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless — significant of the whole history of Dante ! I think it is the mournfulcst face that ever was painted from reality, an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foun- dation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child, but all this is as if con- gealed into sharp contradiction, into abne- gation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain. A soft, ethereal soul, looking out so stern, im- placable, grim, trenchant as from imprison- ment of thick-ribbed ice ! Withal, it is a si- lent pain, too ; a silent, scornful one : the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 45 thing that is eating out his heart, — as if it were, withal, a mean, insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and life-long, unsur- rendering battle against the world. Affec- tion all converted into indignation — an im- placable indignation, slow, equable, silent, like that of a god ! The eye, too, it looks — out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry, why the world was of such a sort ? This is Dante ; so he looks, this *' voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us '' his mystic, un- fathomable song." Aprii, 24. The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man ; whatsoever he believes, he believes for himself, not for another. ApriIv 25. Prayer is the aspiration of our poor strug- gling, heavy-laden soul towards its Eternal Father, and, with or without words, ought 46 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. not to become impossible, nor, I persuade myself, need it ever. Loyal sons and sub- jects can approach the King's throne, who have no requests to make there, except that they may continue loyal. Aprii. 26. Popularity is a blaze of illumination, or, alas ! of conflagration kindled round a man, showing what is in him ; often abstracting much from him, conflagrating the poor man himself into ashes and caput morturum. Aprii. 27. Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from the delusive to the real, and make a new blessed world of us by-and-by. ApriIv 28. Men do less than they ought unless they do all that they can. Aprii, 29. A DANDY is a clothes-wearing man, — a CARLYLE YEAR'BOOK. 47 man whose trade, office and existence con- sist in the wearing of clothes, — every faculty of his soul, spirit, person, and purse is heroic- ally consecrated to this one object — the wear- ing of clothes wisely and well ; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress. • Aprii, 30. Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book. Not like a dead city of stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair ; more like a tilled field, but then a spiritual field : like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it stands from year to year, and from age to age (we have Books that already number some hundred and fifty human ages) ; and yearly comes its new produce of leaves (Com- mentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, Politi- cal System ; or were it only Sermons, Pam- phlets, Journalistic Essays), every one of which is talismanic and thaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. Onward and nearer rides the sun of May ; And wide around, tlie marriage of the plants Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain The surge of Summer's beauty ; dell and crag, Hollow and lake, hill-side and pine arcade, Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff Has thousand faces in a thousand hours. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 48 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 49 May I. Nature's laws are eternal ; her small still voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under terrible penalties, be disre- garded. May 2. A MUSICAL thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing ; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely, the melody that lies hidden in it, the inward harmony of cohe- rence which is its soul, whereby it exists and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious, naturally utter themselves in song. The meaning of song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that ! 4 50 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. May 3, Do the duty that is nearest thee. Thy sec- ond duty^vill already have become cleaicr. May 4. Awake, arise ! Speak forth what is in thee, what God has given thee, what tlie devil shall not take away. Hi<^her task than that of Priesthood was allotted to no man ; wert thou but the meanest in that sacred Hierarchy, is it not honor enough therein to spend and be spent ? ( ]Mav 5. You cannot make an association out of insincere men ; you cannot build an edifice except by plummet and level — at right angles to one another. May 6. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him. May 7. We may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that are in man, if CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such things were and are in man ; in all men, in us too. May 8. You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturity in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper air to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, and his rapt astonish- ment, at the sight we daily witness with in- difference ! May 9. Experience takes dreadfully high school- wages, but he teaches like no other. May 10. Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of force; he has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an Actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an Ideal. 52 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. May II. Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grows meaner and more hostile. May 12. Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man. . . No prayer, no religion ; or at least only a dumb and lamed one. Prayer is a turning of one's soul, in heroic reverence, in infinite desire and endeavor, towards the Highest, the All Excellent, Omnipotent, Supreme. May 13. Generations are as the days of toilsome mankind ; death and truth are the vesper and the matin bells that summon mankind to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the father has made, the son can make and enjoy ; but has also work of his own offered him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards ; arts, establishments, opinions, nothing is ever completed, but ever completing. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 53 May 14. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. May 15. In a vah'ant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he who stands in the van of war, fronting the peril which frightens back all others, which, if it be not vanquished, will devour the others. Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns. May 16. Poetry is but another form of wisdom, of religion ; is itself wisdom and religion. May 17. A GREAT soul, any sincere soul knows not what he is— alternates between the highest heights and the lowest depths ; can, of all things, the least measure — himself ! May 18. In the true literary man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a 54 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, sacredness ; he is the light of the world ; the world's priest, — guiding it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of time. May 19. Great is self-denial ! . . . Life goes all to ravels and tatters where that is not. May 20. All that a man docs is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight by the way in which he sings; his courage or want of courage is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He one is and preaches the same self abroad in all those ways. May 21. It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense — sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next ! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 55 May 22. Thought works in silence ; so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence. May 23. A LIE should be trampled on and extin- guished whenever found : I am for fumigat- ing the atmosphere when I suspect that false- hood, like a pestilence, breathes around me. May 24. It seems to me a great truth, that human things cannot stand on selfishness, mechani- cal utilities, economies, and law courts ; that if there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin. May 25. Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the infinite in the finite, — of the ideal made real. 56 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. May 26. How does the poet speak to men with power but by being still more of a man than they ? May 27. Our good business in life is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. May 2S. Nature is the time-vesture of Grd that reveals Him to the wise and hides Him from the foolish. May 29. SHAKESrEARE says we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising, that we do not look around a little and see what is passing under our very eyes. May 30. Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 57 May 31. There is no life of a man, faithfully re- corded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed. June. Let me go where'er I will, I hear a sky-born music still. It is not only in the rose, It is not only in the bird. But in the darkest, meanest things There always, always something sings. — Ralph Waldo EiMERson. 58 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 59 June I. What is nature? Art thou not the '' Living Garment " of God? O Heavens, is it, in very deed, He that ever speaks through thee ; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and hopes in me ? Sweeter than dayspring to the shipwrecked in Nova Zem- bla ; ah ! like the mother's voice to her little child that strays bewildered, Aveeping in unknown tumults : like soft streamings of celestial music to my too-exasperated heart, came the Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, or charnel-house with specters, but godlike and my Father's ! June 2. It is ever my thought that the most God- fearing man should be the most blithe man. June 3. Mystical, more than magical, is that communing of soul with soul, both looking 6o CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. heavenward. Here properly soul first speaks with soul ; for in looking heavenward, take it in what sense you may, not in looking earthward, does what we call union, love, society, begin to be possible. June 4- Is the white Tomb of our Loved One, who died from our arm, and had to be left behind us there, which rises in the distance like a pale, mournfully receding milestone, to tell how many toilsome, unchcered miles we have journeyed on alone, but a pale, spectral illusion? Is the lost Friend still mysteriously here, even as we are here mys- teriously with God? Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable ; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever. June 5. The seeing eye ! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things ; what nature meant, what musical idea nature has wrapped CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 6i up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. June 6. It is a most earnest thing to be ahve in this world. Junk 7. To shape the whole Future is not our prob- lem ; but only to shape faithfully a small part of it, according to rules already known. It is perhaps possible for each of us, who will with due earnestness inquire, to ascertain clearly what he, for his own part, ought to do ; this let him, with true heart, do, and continue doing. The general issue will, as it has always done, rest well, with a higher intelligence than ours. . . . This day thou knowest ten thousand duties, seest in thy mind ten things which should be done for one that thou doest ! Do one of these ; this of itself will show thee ten others which can and shall be done. 62 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. June 8. The great law of culture, let each become all that he was created capable of being : ex- pand, if possible, to his full growth ; resisting all impediments casting off all foreign, especi- ally all noxious, adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may. June 9. Action hangs, as it were, "dissolved" in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow, and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him. June 10. My books are friends that never fail me. June II. Laws written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death ; I say the laws are there, and thou CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 63 shalt not disobey them. It were better for thee not. Better a hundred deaths than yea ! Terrible " penalties," if thou wilt still need penalties, are there for disobeying. Junk 12. The man is the spirit he worketh in : not what he did, but what he became. Junk 13. Know that " impossible," where truth and mercy and the everlasting voice of na- ture order, has no place in the brave man's dictionary. That when all men have said '^ impossible," and tumbled noiselessly else- whither, and thou alone art left, then first thy time and possibility have come. It is for thee now ; do thou that, and ask no man's counsel but thy own only and God's. Junk 14. All inmost things, we may say', are melo- dious ; naturally utter themselves in song. The meaning of song goes deep. Poetry, 64 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. therefore, we call musical thought. See deep enough, and you see musically. The heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. June 15. The believing man is the sincere man ; whatsoever he believes, he believes for him- self, not for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, an original man, in this sense ; no mortal is doomed to bean insincere man. Whole ages, what we call ages of faith, are original ; all men in them, or the most of men in them, sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages : every worker, in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance, but on substance ; every work issues in a result ; the general sum of such work is great ; for all of it, as genuine, tends towards one goal ; all of it is additive, none of it is subtractive. There is true union, true kin- ship, loyalty, all true and blessed things, so far as the poor earth can produce blessed- ness for man. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 65 Junk 16. In the whole world I had one complete approver; in that, as in other cases, one, and it was worth all. June 17. The thing that is uttered from the in- most part of a man's soul, differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer part. The outer is of the day, under the empire of mode ; the outer passes away, in swift end- less changes ; the inmost is the same yester- day, to-day, and forever. Junk 18. Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness, it is because there is an in- finite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite. Junk 19. A POET, without love, were a physical metaphysical impossibility. 5 66 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. June 20. We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing, it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad. June 21. There is in man a higher than a love of happiness ; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness. Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the poet and priest, in all times have spoken and suffered, bear- ing testimony, through strife and through death, of the Godlike that is in man, and how in the Godlike only has he strength and freedom ? June 22. All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble work is alone noble. June 23. The man whom nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 67 him incapable of being insincere. He is under the noble necessity of being true. Junk 24. What art of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy ? What if thou wert born predestined not to be happy, but to be unhappy ! Close thy Koran, open thy Goethe. juNii 25. Love is the beginning of knowledge. June 26. Find a man vv-hose words paint you a like- ness, you have found a man with something. June 27. Society everywhere is some reproduction, not ///supportably inaccurate, of a graduated worship of heroes — reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. June 28. For a genuine man it is no evil to be poor ; there ought to be Literary Men poor, to show whether they are genuine or not ! 6S CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. June 29. We do not now call our great men gods nor admire witJioiit limit : ah, no, witJi limit enough! But if we have no great men, or do not admire at all, — that were a still worse case. June 30. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Great men are the fire-pillars in the dark pilgrimage of mankind ; they stand as heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what may still be. On bravely through the sunshine and the showers ! Time has his work to do and we have ours. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 69 70 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. JUI.Y I. The course of Nature's phases in this our little fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us, but who knows what deeper courses these depend upon ; what infinitely larger Cycle of causes our little Epicycle revolves on ? To the Minnow every cranny and peb- ble, and quality and accident, of its little native brook 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 which its little Creek is regulated, and may from time to time (unmiraculously enough) be quite over- set and reversed ? Such a minnow is Man, his Creek this planet Earth, his ocean the immeasurable All, his Monsoons and peri- odic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence through ^ons of ^ons. JUI^Y 2. The modern-majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest orna- CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 71 ment, and he always consults his dignity by doing it. JUI.Y 3. The true university of these days is a col- lection of books. July 4- The fatal man, is he not always the tui- thinking man, the man who cannot think and see ; but only grope and i?iis?>QQ the na- ture of the thing he works with? He mis- sees it, ////stakes it, as we say ; takes it for one thing, and it is another thing, and leaves him standing like a Futility there ! JUI.Y 5. Religion cannot pass away. Be not dis- turbed by infidelity. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars, but the stars are there and will reappear. JUIvY 6. A TRUE man believes with his whole judg- ment, with all the illumination and discern- 72 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. ment that is in him, and has always so be- Heved. July 7. David's life and history, as written for us in those Psahns of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below\ All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful strug- gle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, dow^n as into entire wreck ; yet a struggle never ended ; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature ! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that : '* a succession of falls? " Man can do no other. In this wild element of a Life he has to struggle onw^ards ; now fallen, deep-abased ; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleed- ing heart, he has to rise again, struggle still onwards. That his struggle be a faith- ful, unconquerable one : that is the question of questions. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 73 JUI.Y 8. The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself '' I,"— ah, what words have we for such things ? — is a breath of heaven ; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. July 9. It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being : those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest vv'hich can the best recognize symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike ? JUIvY 10. The generality of men have no sinceriiy in their speech, no sense or profit in it. You are better listening to the inarticulate winds, regulating, if possible, the dog-kennel of your own heart. JUI.Y II. How one is vexed with little things in 74 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. this life ! The great evils one triumphs over bravely, but the little eat away one's heart. JUIvY 12. Alas ! how all the faults and little in- firmities of the departed seem what they really were, mere virtues imprisoned, obstruc- ted in the strange, sensitive, tremulous ele- ment they were sent to live in ! July 13. All, does not every true man feel he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him ? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in a man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider that no skeptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its influences can destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship that is in man. July 14. In fact, these old Norse songs have a truth in them, an inward perennial truth and CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 75 greatness,— as, indeed, all must have that can very long preserve itself by tradition alone. It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, that this world is after all but a show,— a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,— the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,— the Shakespeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be : *' We are such stuff as Dreams are made of ! " July 15. A MAN must conform himself to Nature's laws, be verily in communion with Nature and tlie truths of things, or Nature will an- swer him, no, not at all ! July 16. Islam means in its way Denial of Self, am 76 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. nihilation of Self. This is yet the highest wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our earth. JUI.Y 17. Whenever you find a sentence musi- cally worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. JUIvY 18. I GIVE Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a canto fcrino ; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple tcrza riiiia, doubtless, helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, make it musical ; — go CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 77 deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, pro- portionates it all : architectural ; which also partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Para- dise, look out on one another like com- partments of a great edifice ; a great super- natural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful ; Dante's World of Souls ; it is, at the bottom, the sincerest of all Poems ; sincerity here, too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts ; and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. JUI.Y 19. How far Ideals can be introduced into Practice, and at what point our impatience with their non-introduction ought to begin, is always a question. I think we may say safely, Let them introduce themselves as far as they can contrive to do it ! If they are the true faith of men, all men ought to be 78 CARLYLR YEAR-BOOK, more or less impatient where they are not found introduced. July 20. There are genuine men of letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious. If Hero be taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is ever honorable, ever the hif^^hest. July 21. That man, in some sense or other, wor- ships Heroes ; that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence great men ; this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings- down whatsoever — the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise bottomless and shoreless. July 22. The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of a man. CARLYLE YEAR-BOO A'. 79 July 23. There is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what Nature has laid in him. July 24. Curious, I say, and not sufificiently consid- ered : how everything does co-operate with all ; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is an indissoluble portion of solar and stellar systems ; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or ir- recognizably, on all men ! It is all a Tree : circulation of sap and influence, mutual com- munication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of the whole. July 25. I WILL call this Luther a true Great Man ; great in intellect, in courage, affection and 8o CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. integrity ; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a liewn obelisk ; but as an Alpine mountain, — so simple, hon- est, spontaneous, not setting-up to be great at all ; there for quite another purpose than being great ! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens ; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers ! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet ; once more, a true Son of Na- ture and Fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven. JUI,Y 26. On the whole, a man must not complain of his '* element," of his *' time," or the like ; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad ; well, then, he is there to make it better. JUI.Y 27. There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 8i due; woe to him that refuses it when it is! God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run : there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim that one makes upon another. juiember» Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow, And through the wild-piled snowdrift The warm rosebuds below. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 124 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 125 November i. Hast thou looked at the Potter's wheel, one of the venerable objects ; old as the Prophet Ezekiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circu- lar disks. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel, reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking ! Even such a Potter were Destiny with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin ! Of an idle, unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like the most assid- uous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch : let her spend on him what expensive coloring and gilding and enameling she will, he is but a botch, not a dish ; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squink-cornered, amor- phous botch,— a mere enameled vessel of dishonor ! Let the idle think of that. 126 CARLYLR YEAR-BOOK. November 2. My poor little Jeannie! my poor, ever- true life-partner, hold up thy little heart. We have had a sore life-pilgrimage together, much bad road, poor lodging.and bad weath- er, little like what I could have wished or dreamed for my little woman. But we stood it, too ; and, if it please God, there are yet good years ahead of us, better and quieter much than the past have been now and then. ]\Iy poor, heavy-laden, brave, un- complaining Jeannie ! Oh, forgive me, for- give me, for the much I have thoughtlessly done and omitted, far, far, at all times, from the poor purpose of my mind. And God help us ! thee, poor suffering soul, and also me. God be with thee ! November 3. If I do not stand to myself and to my own cause it will be the worse for me. Heaven help me ! Oh, Heaven ! But it is so always. The elements of our work lie scattered, disorganized, as if in a thick. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. viscous, chaotic ocean, ocean illimitable in all its three dimensions ; and we must swim and sprawl towards them, must snatch them, and victoriously piece them together as we can. Eheu ! Shall I try Frederick, or not try him ! — Journal, 1852. November 4. Old age is not in itself matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks, if we have left our work done behind us. November 5. If men will turn away their faces from God, and set up idols, temporary phantasms, instead of the Eternal One — alas ! the con- sequences are from of old well known. November 6. One is warned by nature herself not to " sit down by the side of sad thoughts " and dwell voluntarily on what is sorrowful and painful. Yet at the same time one has to say for oneself — at least I have — that all the 128 CARLYLE YEAR- BO OK. good I ever got came to nic rather in the shape of sorrow ; and there is nothing noble or god-like in this world but has in it some- thing of " infinite sadness," \'cry different indeed from what the current moral philoso- phies represent it to us ; and surely in a time like ours, if in any time, it is good for a man to be driven, were it by never such harsh methods, into looking at this great universe with his own eyes, for himself and not for another, and trying to adjust himself truly there. November 7. Man is a born owl. I consider it good, however, that one do not get into the state of a beetle, that one try to keep one's shell open, or at least openable. I mean to per- sist in endeavorinc: that. November 8. Tins afternoon I had a beautiful walk on the Dairland Hills moor. A little walking shakes away my sluggishness. The bare CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 129 expanse of silent green upland is round me, far off the world of mountains, and the sea all changed to silver. Out of the dusky sunset — for vapors had fallen — the v/indows of Car- lisle City gleamed visibly upon me ; twenty thousand human bipeds whom I could cover with my hat. On these occasions, unfortu- nately, I think almost nothing. Vague dreams, delusions, idle reminiscences, and confusions are all that occupy me. I am an unprofitable servant. November 9. The great soul of the world i^jiist. With a voice soft as the harmony of spheres, yet stronger, sterner, than all the thunders, this message does now and then reach us through the hollow jargon of things. This great fact we live in, and were made by. It is a " noble Spartan mother" to all of us that dare be sons to it. Courage ! We must not quit our shields; we must return home upon our shields, having fought in the battle till we died. 6 CA RL YL E 3 'KA R-B O OK November io. Thought once awakened docs not again slumber ; unfolds itself into a system of thought ; grows, in man after man, genera- tion after generation — till its full stature is reached ; and such systems of thought can grow no farther, but must give place to an- other. November ii. I llxWE not got one word to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings of work are even more formidable than the executing of it. I seem to myself at present, and for a long while past, to be sunk deep, fifty miles deep, below the region of articu- lation, and, if ever I rise to speak again, must raise whole continents with me. Some hundred of times I have felt, and scores of times I have said and written, that Oliver is an impossibility ; yet I am still found at it, without any visible results at all. Remorse, too, for my sinful, disgraceful sloth accom- panies me, as it well may. I am, as it were, CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 131 without a language. Tons of dull books have I read on this matter, and it is still only looming as through thick mists on my eye. There looming, or flaming visible — did it ever flame, which it has never yet been made to do — in what terms am I to set it forth ? I wish often I could write rhyme. A new form from centre to surface, unlike what I find anywhere in myself or others, would alone be appropriate for the indescribable chiaro-oscuro and waste bewilderment of this subject. — Journal, 1842. November 12. The stars in the heavens and the little blue-bells by the wayside alike show forth the handiwork of Him who is Almighty, who is all good. November 13. The Future alone belongs to us. Let us doubly and trebly struggle to profit by tliat — turn tJiat to double and treble account. 132 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. November 14- The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself " I " — ah, what words have we for such things ?— is a breath of heaven; the hicfhest bein^r reveals himself in man. November 15. The man who cannot w^onder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he president of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste and Hegel's Philosophy and the epitome of Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head, — is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have eyes look through him, then he may be useful. November 16. So many beautiful styles of books, with nothing in them ; a man is a malefactor to the world who writes such ! They are the avoidable kind. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 133 November 17. It is in what I called Portrait-painting, de- lineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. It is unexam- pled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at re- veals not this or that face of it, but its in- most heart and generic secret : it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he dis- cerns the perfect structure of it. November 18. Worship of a hero is transcendent wonder of a great man. November 19. The latest Gospel in this world is. Know thy work and do it. '' Know thyself ; " long enough has that poor *' self " of thine tor- mented thee ; thou wilt never get to " know " it, I believe ! Think it not thy hiisincss, this of knowing thyself ; thou art in unknowable individual ; know what thou 134 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. canst work at : and work at it like a Hercules ; that will be thy better plan. November 20. Absolutely without originality there is no num. November 21. Had Johnson left nothini; hw\,\\\^ Diction- ary one might have traced there a great in- tellect — a genuine man. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness ; it stands there like a great, solid, square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete : you judge that a true builder did it. November 22. The most significant feature in the history of an epoch, is the manner it has of wel- coming a great man. November 23. The hero is he who believes in the inward sphere of things, in the true, divine and eter CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 135 nal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the temporary, trivial ; his being is in that ; he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be, in declaring himself abroad. His life is a piece of the everlasting heart of nature herself ; all men's life is, — but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times ; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them. November 24. Nature does not make all great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mold. November 25. We speak of the Volume of Nature ; and truly a Volume it is, — whose Author and writer is God. To read it ! Dost thou, docs man, so much as well know the al- phabet thereof? With its words, sentences, and grand descriptive pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through Solar 136 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. Systems, and thousands of years, we shall not try thee. It is a volume written in ce- lestial hieroglyphics, in the true Sacred-writ- ing; of which even the Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line As for your Institutes, and Academies of Science, they strive bravely ; and, from amid the thick-curved, inextricably inter- twisted hieroglyphic writings, pick out, by dexterous combination, some Letters in the vulgar Character, and therefrom put to- gether this and the other economic Recipe, of high avail in practice. That Nature is more than some boundless volume of such Recipes, or huge, well-nigh inexhaustible Domestic- Cookery-Book, of which the whole secret will in this manner one day evolve itself, the fewest dream. November 26. Instead of saying that man is the crea- ture of circumstances, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstances. Our strength is measured CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 137 by our plastic power. From the same ma- terial one man builds palaces, another hotels; one warehouses, another villas ; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else. Thus it is that in the same family, in the same circumstances, one man rears a stately edifice, while his brother, vacillating and in- competent, lives forever amid ruins; the block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak became a step- ping-stone in the pathway of the strong. November 27. I CONFESS, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. November 28. What an enormous caniera-obscura m?i^m~ fier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human heart is there to encourage it. 138 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. November 29. The body of all truth dies, and yet in all I say there is a soul which never dies, which in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself ! November 30. Detached : separated ! I say there is no such separation ; nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all ; is borne forward in the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or the matter from which the earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed, no meanest object is insignificant ; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself. December. Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight ; the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven. And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end. The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the house- mates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 139 140 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. December i. Some " Chivalry of Labor," some noble Humanity and practical Divincness of Labor will yet be realized on this Earth. Or why ivill^ why do, we pray to Heaven, without setting our own shoulder to the wheel? The Present, if it will have the Future ac- complish, shall itself commence. Thou who prophesiest, who believest, begin thou to fulfil. Here or nowhere, now equally as at any time. December 2. To the poet, as to every other, we say first of all, see if you cannot do that; it is no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other and name yourself a poet ; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in ac- tion or speculation, all manner of hope. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 141 December 3. Nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. All men are to an unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a strange em- blem of every man's ; and Human Portraits, faithfully drawn, are of all pictures the wel- comest on human walls. December 4- Dear old mother, weak and sick and dear to me, while I live in God's creation, what a day has this been in my solitary thought ; for, except a few words to Jane, I have not spoken to any one, nor, indeed, hardly seen any one, it being dusk and dark before I went out — a dim, silent Sabbath day, the sky foggy, dark and damp, and a universal stillness the consequence, and it is this day gone fifty-eight years that I was born. And my poor mother ! Well! we are all in God's hands. Surely God is good. Surely we ought to trust in Him, or what trust is there 142 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. for the sons of men ? Oh, my clear mother ! Let it ever be a comfort to you, however weak you are, that you did your part honor- ably and well while in strength, and were a noble mother to me and to us all. I am now myself grown old, and have had various things to do and suffer for so many years; but there is nothing I ever had to be so much thankful for as the mother I had. That is a truth which I know well, and per- haps this day again it may be some com- fort to you. Yes, surely, for if there had been any good in the things I have uttered in the world's hearing, it was j't7//r voice es- sentially that was speaking through me ; essentially, what you and my brave father meant and taught me to mean ; this was the purport of all I spoke and wrote, and if in the few years that may remain to me, I am to get any more written for the world, will still be yours. May God reward you, dearest mother, for all you have done for me ! I never can. Ah, no ! but I will think of it with gratitude and pious love so long as I CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 143 have the power of thinking. And I will pray God's blessing on you, now and always. Chelsea, Dec. 4, 1853. December 5. Brother, thou hast possibility in thee for much : the possibility of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic life. That noble, down-fallen or yet unborn " Im- possibility," thou canst lift it up, thou canst, by thy soul's travail, bring it into clear being. December 6. Neither let mistakes nor wrong directions of which every man, in his studies and else- where, falls into wrong, discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully, to be right ; he will grow daily more and more right. December 7. All true work is sacred : in all true Work, were it but true hand-labor, there is some- thing of divineness. Labor, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat 144 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. of the brow, and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart ; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all Science, all spoken Epics, all acted Hero- isms, Martyrdoms, up to that Agony of bloody sweat, which all men have called divine ! O, brother, if this is not " worship," then I say, the more pity for worship : for this is the noblest thing yet discovered un- der God's sky. Who art thou that com- plainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, wearied brother; see thy fellow- workmen there, in God's Eternity : surviving there, they alone surviving: sacred band of Immortals, Celestial Bodyguards of the Em- pire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods ; they alone surviving : peo- pling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes of Time. December 8. The poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages ; whom all ages possess, when once CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 145 he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce — and will produce, always when nature pleases. Let nature send a hero-soul ; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a poet. December 9. Man's spiritual nature, the vital force that dwells in him, is essentially one and indivis- ible ; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so-forth, are but different figures of the same power of insight, all in- dissolubly connected with each other, physi- ognomically related ; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Mo- rality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital force whereby he is and works ? DECEMBER 10. The wise man is but a clever infant, spell- ing letters from a hieroglyphical prophet book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity. 10 146 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. December ii. Sweep away the illusions of time ; glance, if thou have eyes, from the near morning cause to the far-distant Mover! Then saw- est thou that this fair universe were in the meanest promise thereof, is in very deed, the Star-domed City of God ; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish. December 12. *' Happy," my brother ! First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not ? To-day becomes Yesterday so fast, all To-morrows become Yesterdays ; and then there is no question whatever of the ** happi- ness," but quite another question. Nay, thou hast such a sacred pity left, at least for thyself, thy very pains, once gone over into Yesterday, become joys to thee. Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly blessed- CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 147 ness and indispensable sanative virtue was in them ; thou shalt only know it after many days, when thou art wiser ! December 13. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free thought before us ; but his thought as he could trans- late it into the stone that was given, with the tools were given. Disjecta mcvibra are all that we find of any poet, or of any man. DECEMBER 14. Tolerance has to tolerate the ^/;/essen- tial, and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not here to tolerate ! We are here to resist, to control and van- quish withal. We do not tolerate falsehoods, thieveries, iniquities, when they fasten on us; w^e say to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable! We are here to extin- guish falsehoods and put an end to them. 148 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. December 15. But our work, — behold that is not abol- ished, that has not vanished : our work, be- hold it remains, or the want of it remains : and that is now the sole question with us forevermore ! Brief, bawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns, tinsel-gilt, is gone ; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silence and her veracities, is come ! What hast thou done, and how ? DECEMBER 16. What greater calamity can fall upon a man than the loss of worship ? December 17. Knowest thou not, thou canst not move a step on this earth without finding some duty to be done, and that every man is use- ful to his kind, by the very fact of his exist- ence ? CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 149 Dkcember 18. It is Nature's highest reward to a true, sim- ple, great soul that he gets thus to be a part of herself. Such a man's work, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and fore- thought shall accomplish, grows up withal unconsciously from the unknown deeps in him — as the oak tree grows from the earth's bosom, as the mountains and waters shape themselves, with a symmetry grounded on nature's own laws, conformable to all truth whatsoever. December 19. The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man ; how much more the done Work. Whatsoever of morality and intelligence ; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness, of method, in- sight, ingenuity, energy ; in a word, what- ever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the Work he does. 15° CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. December 20. For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them ; to have some Soul in them. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness : will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form, or reform, said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine ! December 21. The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere. To his large, open, deep-fccling heart Nature is a fact, all hearing is hearsay ; the unspeakable great- ness of this IMystery of Life, let him acknowl- edge it or not, nay, even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him, — fearful and wonderful, on this hand or on that. CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 151 DECEMBER 22. Every day that is born into this world comes like a burst of music, and rings itself all the day through, and thou shalt make it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as thou wilt. December 23. All speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in it ; not a parish in the world but has its parish accent— the rhythm or tune to which the people there sing what they have to say. Accent is a kind of chanting ; all men have accents of their own— though they only notice that of others. Observe, too, how all passionate language does of itself become musical— with a finer music than the mere accent ; the speech of a man even in zealous anger be- comes a chant, a song. All deep things are sung. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song ; as if all the rest were but wrappage and hulls ! The primal ele- ment of us; of us and of all things. CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. December 24. You must have a man to direct who knows well what the duty is that he has to do, and who is determined to go through that, in spite of all clamor raised against him ; and who is not anxious to obtain approba- tion, but is satisfied that he will obtain it by-and-by, provided that he acts ingenuously and faithfully. Society, which the more 1 think of it as- tonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth. December 25. A MAN who will do faithfully, needs to be- lieve firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage : if he cannot dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suffrage serve, he is a poor eye-servant, the work committed to him will be misdone. December 26. No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something ; he knows not what mischief he CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 153 does, past computation, scattering words without meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. December 27. Tools ? Thou hast no Tools ? Why, there is not a man or a thing now alive but has tools. The basest of created animal- cules, the Spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, and a warping-mill, and power-loom within its head ; the stupidest of Oysters has a Papin's-Digesta, with stone-and-lime house to hold it in ; every being that can live can do something ; this let him do. — Tools ? hast thou not a brain furnished, furnishable with some glimmerings of Light, and three fingers to hold a pen withal ? Never since Aaron's rod went out of practise, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool. December 28. Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the artist or poet has risen into Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God and worship the same. I mean religious Sym- 54 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. bols. Various enough have been such re- ligious Symbols, what we call Religious ; as men stood in this stage of culture or the other ; and could worse or better body forth the Godlike : some Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth ; many with only an extrin- sic. If thou ask to what height man has car- ried it in this manner, look on our divinest Symbol, on Jesus of Nazercth, and His biog- raphy, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human thought not yet reached ; this is Christianity and Christendom ; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character whose sigr ificance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest. December 29. Gaze then in the face of thy Brother, in those eyes where plays the lambent fire of kindness, or in those where rages the lurid conflagration of Anger : feel how thy own Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate in each other, till it is all one limitless confluent CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 155 flame (of embracing Love or deadly grap- pling Hate) ; and then say what miraculous virtue goes out of man into man. But if so, through all the thick-piled hulls of the Divine Life we speak, and inmost Me is, as it were, brought into contact with inmost Me ! December 30. Generation after generation takes to it- self the Form of a Body ; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission appears. What Force and Fire is in each he expends ; one grinding in the mill of In- dustry ; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in Avar with his fellow ;— and then the Heaven- sent is re-called, his earthly vesture falls away, and conversion to Sense, becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild- flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's artillery, does this mysterious mankind thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-suc- ceeding grandeur, through the unknown 156 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breath- ing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane, haste stormfully across the astonished Earth, then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, in our passage ; can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive ? On the hardest ada- mant some footprint of us is stamped in ; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence ? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not ; only that it is through Mystery to Mys- tery, from God to God. December 31. Remember now and always that life is no idle dream, but a solemn reality and encom- passed by eternity. Find out your task : stand by it ; the night cometh when no man can work. DEC 8 1900