The details of the struggle, however, are not given
us; it is the result only that we know. But it is evident that the
progress of his mind from the bog-region of orthodoxy to the high
realms of thought and faith was a slow proceeding,--not rolled onward
as with the chariot-wheels of a fierce and sudden revolution, but
gradually developed in a long series of births, growths, and deaths.
The theological phraseology sticks to him, indeed, even to the present
time, although he puts it to new uses; and it acquires in his hands a
power and significance which it possessed only when, of old, it was
representative of the divine.
Carlyle was matured in solitude. Emerson found him, in the year 1833,
on the occasion of his first visit to England, living at
Craigenputtock, a farm in Nithsdale, far away from all civilization,
and "no one to talk to but the minister of the parish." He, good man,
could make but little of his solitary friend, and must many a time
have been startled out of his canonicals by the strange, alien
speeches which he heard.
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