sition-a trivial embellishment, like the mouldings of furniture, the cornices of ceilings, or the arabesques of tea-urns. On the contrary, it is a product of art the rarest, subtlest, and most intellectual; and like other products of the fine arts, it is then finest when it is most eminently disinterested, that is, most conspicuously detached from gross palpable uses. Yet, in very many cases, it really has the obvious. uses of that gross palpable order; as in the cases just noticed, when it gives light to the understanding, or power to the will, removing obscurities from one set of truths, and into another circulating the life-blood of sensibility. In these cases, meantime, the style is contemplated as a thing separable from the thoughts; in fact, as the dress of the thoughts-a robe that may be laid aside at pleasure. But

3. There arises a case entirely different, where style cannot be regarded as a dress or alien covering, but where style becomes the incarnation of the thoughts. The human body is not the dress or apparel of the human spirit: far more mysterious is the mode of their union. Call the two elements A and B: then it is impossible to point out A as existing aloof from B, or vice versa. A exists in and through B, B exists in and through A. No profound observer can have failed to observe this illustrated in the capacities of style. Imagery is sometimes not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, and of a nature to be detached from the thought, but is the coefficient that, being superadded to something else, absolutely makes the thought.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

1795-1881.

[Carlyle wrote frequently on literary topics, though more from the intellectual than the æsthetic standpoint. Some of his critical essays, notably that upon Burns, are among the best of their class. His power of sympathy in itself makes him a true critic, aside from his sharp insight and vivid expression. The quotations given below are from the Hero as Man of Letters, one of the lectures in his popular volume on Heroes and Hero-worship. This analysis of the secrets and tests of success in poetry is most suggestive. The sketch of Dante, while an exception to the manner of most of our selections, is too characteristic of Carlyle and too fine to be omitted from its context.]

From the Lecture on "The Poet" in Heroes and Hero Wor

ship.

POET and prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; Vates means both prophet and poet and indeed at all times, prophet and poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are the same; in this most important respect especially, that they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the universe; what Goethe calls "the open secret." "Which is the great secret?" asks one." The open secret," open to all, seen by almost none! That

divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all beings, "the divine idea of the world, that which lies at the bottom of appearance," as Fichte styles it; of which all appearance, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the appearance of man and his work, is but the vesture, the embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery is in all times and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realized thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,-as if, says the satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together. It could do no good, at present, to speak much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity; -a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!

that sacred mys

-But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the Vates, whether prophet or poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he is to reveal that to us, tery which he more than others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it ;-I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked of him, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no hearsay, but a direct insight and belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of

nature to live in the very fact of things. A man

universe, though all He is a Vates, first

once more, in earnest with the others were but toying with it. of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far poet and prophet, participators in the "open secret," are one.

With respect to their distinction again: the Vates prophet, we may say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as good and evil, duty and prohibition; the Vates poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The prophet too has his eye on what we are to love how else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest voice ever heard on this earth said withal, "Consider the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." glance, that, into the deepest deep of beauty. "The lilies of the field,"-dressed finer than earthly princes, springing-up there in the humble furrowfield; a beautiful eye looking-out on you, from the great inner sea of beauty! How could the rude earth make these, if her essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not inwardly beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning: "The beautiful,” he intimates, "is higher than the good; the beautiful includes in it the good." The true beautiful; which however, I have said somewhere, "differs from the

A

false as heaven does from Vauxhall!" So much for the distinction and identity of poet and prophet.

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few poets who are accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect poet! A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of poetry. We are all poets when we read a poem well. The "imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakespeare can embody out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of "Hamlet" as Shakespeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as to become noticeable, will be called poet by his neighbors. World-poets too, those whom we are to take for perfect poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One who rises so far above the general level of poets will, to such and such critics, seem a universal poet; as he ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All poets, all men, have some touches of the universal; no man is wholly made of that. Most poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest Shakespeare or Homer of them can be