--Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
THOMAS CARLYLE is a name which no man of this generation should
pronounce without respect; for it belongs to one of the high-priests
of modern literature, to whom all contemporary minds are indebted, and
by whose intellect and influence a new spiritual cultus has been
established in the realm of letters. It is yet impossible to estimate
either the present value or the remote issues of the work which he has
accomplished. We see that a revolution in all the departments of
thought, feeling, and literary enterprise has been silently achieved
amongst us, but we are yet ignorant of its full bearing, and of the
final goal to which it is hurrying us. One thing, however, is clear
respecting it: that it was not forced in the hot-bed of any possible
fanaticism, but that it grew fairly out of the soil, a genuine product
of the time and its circumstances. It was, indeed, a new manifestation
of the hidden forces and vitalities of what we call Protestantism,--an
assertion by the living soul of its right to be heard once more in a
world which seemed to ignore its existence, and had set up a ghastly
skeleton of dry bones for its oracle and God.
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