What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver? Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold…. Thus has the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo.
From this scepticism, deeper than that of Queen Mab, fiercer than that of Candide, Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a servant of God, even when doubting His existence.
After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me, I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my allegiance….Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland were the price of apostacy.
With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and asserts himself:
Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen
Und das heisst ein Kämpfer seyn.
He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength, and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve.
He would not make his judgment blind;
He faced the spectres of the mind,—
but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master, Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of one making a leap.
Death? Well, Death … let it come then, and I will meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed; not … whining sorrow … but grim defiance.
Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:—