CHAPMAN and HALL 186 STRAND
MDCCCXXXVII.
Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge, kept to us the promises of England. His provokes rather than informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light, like the Jótuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He makes us act rather than think; he does not say, know thyself, which is impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear goal, but an endless Atlantis horizon. He exaggerates. Yes: but he makes the hour great, the future bright, the reverence and admiration strong: while mere precise fact is a coil of lead.
Thoreau
SARTOR RESARTUS.