resident at Chelsea in this year of grace, neither Pantheist, nor Pot-theist, nor any Theist or Ist whatsoever, having the most decided contempt for all such manner of systembuilders or sect-founders-as far as contempt may be compatible with so mild a nature-feeling well beforehand (taught by long experience) that all such are and ever must be wrong. By God's blessing one has got two eyes to look with, also a mind capable of knowing, of believing. That is all the creed I will at this time insist on. And now may I beg one thing that whenever in my thoughts or your own you fall on any dogma that tends to estrange you from me, pray believe that to be false, false as Beelzebub, till you get clearer evidence?

This is an explicit statement, and no one who knew Carlyle or has read his books can doubt the sincerity of it. It is true also that while in London he belonged to no recognised body of believers, regarding all such as system-mongers' with whom he could have nothing to do. He had attended the Presbyterian church in Annandale, for it was the communion in which he was born. He had read the Bible to his household at Craigenputtock. But the Kirk in London was not the Kirk in Scotland. He made one or two experiments to find something not entirely unworthy.

I tried various chapels (he said to me); I found in each some vulgar illiterate man declaiming about matters of which he knew nothing. I tried the Church of England. I found there a decent educated gentleman reading out of a book words very beautiful which had expressed once the sincere thoughts of pious admirable souls. I decidedly preferred the Church of England man, but I had to say to him: 'I perceive, sir, that at the bottom you know as little about the matter as the other fellow.'

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE.

45

Thus, with the Church of England, too, he had not been able to connect himself, and as it was the rule of his life not only never to profess what he did not believe, but never by his actions to seem to believe it, he stayed away and went to no place of worship except accidentally.

Meanwhile the fortnight's idleness expired; he went to work again over his lost volume, but became so sick' that he still made little progress. Emerson continued to press him to move for good and all to America, where he would find many friends and a congenial audience for his teaching; and more than once he thought of leaving the unlucky thing unwritten and of acting on Emerson's advice. He was very weary, and the books with which he tried to distract himself had no charm.

Journal

May 26, 1835.-Went on Sunday with Wordsworth's new volume to Kensington Gardens; got through most of it there. A picture of a wren's nest, two pictures of such almost all that abides with me. A genuine but a small diluted man. No other thing can I think of him; they must sing and they must say whatsoever seems good to them. Coleridge's Table Talk,' also insignificant for most part, a helpless Psyche overspun with Church of England cobwebs; a weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man. The Nunc Domine's I hear chanted about these two persons had better provoke no reply from me. What is false in them passes. What is true deserves acceptance-speaks at least for a sense on their part.

The book-the poor book-can make no progress at all. I sit down to it every day, but feel broken down at the end of a page; page too not written, only scribbled. Suppose that we did throw it by. It is not by paper alone that a

man lives. My bodily health is actually very bad. To get a little rest and bloom up again out of this wintry obstruction, impotence, and desolation, were the first attainment. To-day I am full of dyspepsia, but also of hope. The world is not a bonehouse; it is a living home, better or worse.

Disastrous twilight! dim eclipse! That is the state I sit in at present. Singular, too, how near my extreme misery is to peace, almost to some transient glimpses of happiness. It seems to me I shall either before long recover myself into life (alas! I have never yet lived) or end it, which alternative is not undesirable to me. I am actually learning to take it easier..

Coleridge's Table Talk' insignificant yet expressive of Coleridge a great possibility that has not realised itself. Never did I see such apparatus got ready for thinking, and so little thought. He mounts scaffolding, pulleys, and tackle, gathers all the tools in the neighbourhood with labour, with noise, demonstration, precept, abuse, and sets-three bricks. I do not honour the man. I pity him (with the opposite of contempt); see in him one glorious up-struggling ray (as it were) which perished, all but ineffectual, in a lax, languid, impotent character. This is my theory of Coleridge-very different from that of his admirers here. Nothing, I find, confuses me more than the admiration, the kind of man admired, I see current here. So measurable these infinite men do seem, so unedifying the doxologies chanted to them. Yet in that also there is something which I really do try to profit by. The man that lives has a real way of living, built on thought of one or the other sort. He is a fact. Consider him. Draw knowledge from him.

No work to-day, as of late days or weeks, neither does my conscience much reproach me. This is rather curious. Significant of what?

It was significant of a growing misgiving on Carlyle's part that he had mistaken his profession, and that as a man of letters-as a true and honest man of letters-he could not live. Everything was

THOUGHTS OF ABANDONING LITERATURE. 47

against him. No one wanted him; no one believed his report; and even Fate itself was now warning him off with menacing finger. Still in a lamed condition he writes on June 4 to his mother:

I have grave doubts about many things connected with this book of mine and books in general, for all is in the uttermost confusion in that line of business here. But, God be thanked, I have no doubt about my course of duty in the world, or that, if I am driven back at one door, I must go on trying at another. There are some two or even three outlooks opening on me unconnected with books. One of these regards the business of national education which Parliament is now busy upon, in which I mean to try all my strength to get something to do, for my conscience greatly approves of the work as useful. Whether I shall succeed herein I cannot with the smallest accuracy guess as yet. Another outlook invites my consideration from America, a project chalked out for passing a winter over the water and lecturing there. Something or other we shall devise. I shall probably have fixed on nothing till we meet and have a smoke together, and get the thing all summered and wintered talking together freely once more.

It was a mere chance at this time that the 'French Revolution' and literature with it were not flung aside for good and all, and that the Carlyle whom the world knows had never been. If Charles Buller, or Molesworth, or any other leading Radical who had seen his worth, had told the Government that if they meant to begin in earnest on the education of the people, here was the man for them, Carlyle would have closed at once with the offer. The effort of writing, always great (for he wrote, as his brother said, 'with his heart's blood' in a state of fevered tension), the indifference of the world to his

past work, his uncertain future, his actual poverty, had already burdened him beyond his strength. He always doubted whether he had any special talent for literature. He was conscious of possessing considerable powers, but he would have preferred at all times to have found a use for them in action. And everything was now conspiring to drive him into another career. If nothing could be found for him at home, America was opening its arms. He could lecture for a season in New England, save sufficient money, and then draw away into the wilderness, to build a new Scotsbrig in the western forest. So the possibility presented itself to him in this interval of enforced helplessness. He would go away and struggle with the stream no more. And yet at the bottom of his mind, as he told me, something said to him, 'My good fellow, you are not fit for that either.' Perhaps he felt that when he was once across the water, America would at any rate be a better mother to him than England, would find what he was suited for, and would not let his faculties be wasted. In writing to his mother he made light of his troubles, but his spirit was nearly broken.

To John Carlyle.

Chelsea: June 15, 1835.

My poor ill-starred 'French Revolution' is lying as a mass of unformed rubbish, fairly laid by under lock and key. About a fortnight after writing to you last this was the deliberate desperate resolution I came to. My way was daily getting more intolerable, more inconsiderable, comparable, as I often say, to a man swimining in vacuo. There was labour nigh insufferable, but no joy, no furtherance. My poor nerves, for long months kept at the stretch, felt all too waste,