Goethe was building up out of the ruins of Europe a new world of thought.

Amid such conditions Thomas Carlyle entered upon his career. Many men of less power assumed a negative attitude, wiped the slate of their minds clean and betook themselves to silence. For Carlyle such a state of mind was impossible; he could not chew thistle-down for nourishment; he was a positive character a positive character from head to feet; the "Everlasting Yea" was necessary for him, and the denying spirit was commanded to get behind him as a Satan. He was impatient of the sorrows of Byron shrieked in everybody's ears, and of the sorrows of Bonaparte roared out by cannon, and he cried: "Close your Byron and open your Goethe."

Other men, like Wordsworth, had attained a positive condition of mind, but they could not command universal attention. Where was the man whose voice was strong enough, and whose attitude was striking enough, to win a hearing from the world while he asserted the new truth? If Lord Byron was to have a literary successor, where was he to be found? And of what sort was he to be? If the doctrine of despair was to be speared like a dragon, where was the champion who could set his foot on its neck? Strange things happen in this divinely-made world; not from the ranks of princes and nobles was the hero to come. The Lord Byron who always kept his escutcheon hanging near his bed, and who "aspired," as his biographer, John Nichol, tells us, "to the double distinction of being a poet among peers and a peer among poets," who returned a letter that was directed simply to "Mr. Byron," who compelled his intimate friends to address him as Lord," was to have his successor in literary influence in a man born in the cottage of a Scotch peasant. The Englishman was to be succeeded by a Scotchman; the peer by a peasant; the handsomest man of his day by an ungainly, harsh-faced man; the dandy who was a rival of Brummell by a man whose clothes were for use rather than ornament; the lover of ladies by a contemner of the sex; the immoralist by a puritan; the member of the House of Lords by one who was partly trained for the Presbyterian ministry; a student of Cambridge by a graduate of Edinburgh; the

"My

poet, whose verses roll like the waves of the sea, by a prose writer, whose style of music is of the nature of a damaged calliope. Byron's style was often a bridge over which he brought more Latin and Greek allusions than were in good taste; but Carlyle's style was like the North Sea, in which drifted weeds, rubbish, and a thousand other things from Germany.

With everything against him of a social and personal kind, except his wonderful brain and mighty heart, Carlyle bravely attacked the Byronian dragon of despair; and it was he who, with dark eyes flashing under his shaggy brows, and with his black lank hair blown by the winds, with his mighty peasant's arm, let out its life-blood.

As the years went by, it became more and more evident that Carlyle was of the race of the Titans. The Byron who had once seemed to dwarf all writers ancient and modern, whose vogue had been universal, and whose worship even in the home of Goethe had been more ardent than that of the great master himself, and who had been seriously proclaimed a greater poet than Homer, began to grow less and less in size and importance, and the figure of Carlyle became gigantic. The force of his writings surpassed that of any other English author, the immensity of his vocabulary exceeded that of Shakespeare himself; his power to paint in words caused Lowell to say that if he had had the gift of verse the author of "The French Revolution" could have produced an epic superior to those of Homer; the power of his utterance in speech was proclaimed by Froude to surpass that of any man with whom he had ever conversed; his range of knowledge was almost boundless; his personality was of incomparable strength, his pride was regal, his depth of thought was marvellous.

Carlyle illuminated every subject he touched, and he soon became recognized as the greatest thinker in Great Britain; his influence was so vast that there was scarcely a man who did not feel it. Within the church, and without it, the minds of men were shaken as by the blowing of a mighty wind. Carlyle felt most of all the influence of German thought; his chief admiration was for the great Germans. He found in everything in nature a symbol. He admits

that, for a considerable time, his questionings of the infinite brought him back no answer; but after a while the messages began to come. As he found symbolism in nature, so he found in heroic men and women the chief manifestation of the Divine Power. It is difficult, if not impossible, to define Carlyle's exact position; he was a mystic, a pantheist, and a hero-worshipper, but he was vastly more; he was deeply religious, though certainly not orthodox. One evening One evening when he was conversing, or rather monologizing, with several friends in his study, he arose to fix the fire, and with the poker in his hand, he said, with all of his tremendous force, "There is but one thing more horrible than a man without religion, and that is a woman without religion." When he lay dying, he uttered, impressively and with a sense of awful mystery, with his eyes fixed on the infinite, as if he were about to take a voyage on a wide sea, "I am going, going, going."

His favorite quotations were from Goethe and Shakespeare. The one was the song of the Earth Spirit, from "Faust:

"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,

I walk and work, above, beneath, Work and weave in endless motion ! Birth and Death,

An infinite ocean;

A seizing and giving,

The fire of the Living:

'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply

And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."

The other was, "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." In Cheyne Row, Chelsea, in the British metropolis, stands the house in which he lived for many years, and where he died. That place has many historic associations, but for most of us it simply means Carlyle. At the end of the street, on the bank of the Thames, there is now a statue of him, at a point that was his favorite spot; the statue represents him in a posture of reflection, with his deep eyes contemplating the river as if it were the stream of Time. Within his house was that remarkable upper room whose walls were so padded as to be inaccessible to any external sound; there the great thinker, who suffered at times absolute torture from the rattle of carriages, the crowing

of chickens and the barking of dogs, was able to enjoy respite from jarring sounds. On the roof of his house he often sat and smoked, and contemplated the "Infinities and "Eternities" of which he talked so much. In the presence of the mysteries of life he commended reverent silence, and, with his usual magnificent inconsistency, he illustrated it by a shelfful of his own books.

No man was ever less suited to live in the same house with a woman than he. Jane Welsh, his wife, said: "I married Carlyle for ambition; he has far surpassed my wildest expectations, but I am miserable." When she wrote letters to her friends, she sometimes dated them from "Hell." One could hardly fancy a worse perdition for a sensitive, wellbred woman than to live with the irascible dyspeptic, Thomas Carlyle, who had been reared in a peasant's home apart from the softening influences of accomplished young women, a man who at times was magnificent in his outbursts of tenderness, but whose disturbed nerves were easily irritated by all manner of trifles, and whose self-control was so feeble that it could not keep him from pouring out upon everybody the red-hot lava of his anger, with every variation of phrase and qualifying word of which this master of speech was capable. Mrs. Carlyle had had the strange destiny of being sought in marriage by that other marvellous man, Edward Irving; a man much more lovable than Carlyle, and so deeply attached to the woman who rejected him that it is probable that if she had married him he would have kept within the orbit of sanity. The woman, late in her life, in commenting upon her choice, said, justly: "Had I married Irving there would have been no tongues,' referring to his vagary in regard to Pentecostal tongues. It is probable that the taking by Carlyle of a woman whom he did not long want from Irving, who always wanted her, destroyed the career of one of the most marvellous orators of modern times, and turned his church into a bedlam, and ended his brilliant life in darkness. Truly the Terrors as well as the Splendors accompanied Carlyle. When the wife sank dead of heart disease in her carriage in St. James' Park, and the earth had covered her face out of sight, the old man, with his gray hair blowing in the wind, stood uncovered

many times by the grave, muttering: "The light of my life has gone out."

The influence of Carlyle was all on the side of truth and right, even when what he said was mixed with error. The whole drift of his teaching is away from despair and toward optimism. "Infinite love, yet infinite rigor of law; so is nature made," he said.

Of all men who have ever lived, no one has taught mankind so much about the beauty of nature and of art as John Ruskin. It is possible that some poets and painters and sculptors have felt as much of the beautiful, but no one else has deliberately set about instructing mankind so comprehensively in this department. To speak reverently, if an angel from heaven were to visit earth and stay the length of a human life, one can imagine that after explaining the love of God in Christ he could find nothing better to do than to lead men and women through the various scenes of this world, and to point out to them the beauties of earth and heaven, and the meaning of beautiful things. And this is what Ruskin has done. To the duller eyed he has pointed out the beauty in all things, from the tiny stone or flower to the glory of the heavens. One might truly say that the beautiful had never really been seen adequately until the eyes of Ruskin were turned upon it.

Much fun has been made of the ordinary guide, or cicerone, who marches you past miles of pictures and through acres of palaces, and glibly gives a cut-anddried résumé of facts in regard to them; and if Ruskin had been a mere didactic guide, one could feel but little admiration for him. But if the gallery you are visiting is the Universe, and your guide is a miracle-worker who can open your eyes that have heretofore had scales upon them, and if he is a great and marvellous intelligence vastly superior to all his disciples, and if he has all the eloquence of all poets and orators combined in his own speech, this tour of inspection will take on a higher character than the rushing around of a travelling party. One can hardly be accused of hyperbole when one declares that Ruskin is such a guide. He has taken millions of us into the presence of the beautiful; and he has discoursed upon it with an eloquence scarcely equalled by any man, ancient or

modern. Pope, the old-time favorite poet, wrote that "God said, let Newton be and all was light;" we may paraphrase this: "God said, let John Ruskin be and all was beautiful."

It has been the glory of Ruskin to discover the soul in things beautiful, to enable men not only to see but to feel; he has successfully destroyed the force of the Byronic idea of the unreality of the beautiful. Byron had declared: "Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, and fevers into false creation; where- where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone." Ruskin has shown the reality of beauty.

Men had not only been blind largely to the beauties of nature, but they had forgotten to a great extent the real beauties of art. And it was Ruskin who led us to see the glory of old cathedrals, who induced us to climb their walls and study minutely their sculpturings, who made us pause among the stones of Venice, who found in nooks and crannies of forgotten places delights and inspiration for the soul.

He has taught us that beauty is not a mere development, an accident, or a disease, but an eternal thing, one of the chief factors of the universe, one of the colors of the prism that make the white light of God's being.

Ruskin, like Carlyle, had no patience with materialistic science, with "the gospel of dirt." He declared and believed that "Darwin has a mortal fascination for all vainly curious, idly speculative persons, and has collected in the train of him every impudent imbecility in Europe, like a dim comet wagging its useless tail of phosphorescent nothing across the steadfast stars." Ruskin and Carlyle consider the living spirit of man and its manifestations a greater study than the bones of dead animals and the superstitions of degenerate savages. Ruskin said that a man should not think of the germ that he was, or of the skeleton that he is to be, but of the man that he is. He declared at one time, in his indignation against materialistic science and socialistic disturbances, that he and Carlyle alone in all England were for God and the Queen.

This man inherited riches which he has given away; he has been one of the most lavish distributors of money in our time; he has been one of the few men

who have given away not only interest but capital, not only part of his capital but all of it. Had it not been for the large revenue from his books, often amounting to $50,000 a year, he would long ago have been in want and would have been laughed at as a fool soon parted from his money. But when a man has an earning capacity of $50,000 a year, and that when he stubbornly keeps the editions of his books in Great Britain at large prices, he can afford to give away $1,000,000, and no one dare laugh at him, especially when it is John Ruskin who does it. Like Carlyle, he is a man of immense pride and extraordinary independence of character. He has gathered about him in his home the rarest art treasures, and feeds his soul always on the beautiful; he has on his table a large block of chalcedony, carved with the one word "To-day."

The name of Ruskin is associated in the minds of many people chiefly with the book called "Modern Painters," and with his defence of the paintings of Turner. His fight and victory for that great painter make one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of art. He compelled the whole world to see through his eyes, and proved in the face of all critics that Turner's art was supreme. But Ruskin is the author of a shelfful of books beside, of lectures on political economy, and of some extraordinary popular lectures.

Ruskin, like most so-called men of genius, is in many respects an eccentric. A great many little people, who do queer things only because they have no brains, often fancy that they show traits of genius; if they had the genius we could forgive them because of the debt we owe those who produce great and noble things for the world. It is unfortunately true that the real geniuses often do foolish things; Ruskin himself has said, that he is convinced that many of the reformers of the world have been slain or rejected because of their unusual costumes and offensive manners. Ruskin has been neither rejected nor slain, but he has nullified much of his influence by eccentric actions and opinions. A great mill, when the belts are on the wheels, will go on grinding whether there is any wheat running or not, and even when inferior grain or chaff is thrown in. Ruskin's big intellectual mill has ground away some

times when there was very little grain at hand, and when an inferior article has been used. No man's work is always good, not even Shakespeare's; Byron remarked that "Horace had said that Homer sometimes nods; we know without him that Wordsworth sometimes wakes." Ruskin's work is always up to a certain intellectual and artistic level; but his opinions on art are much more valuable than his opinions on political economy or most other matters.

But to understand Ruskin, the man, we must glance at one of the secrets of his life. "Woman was the final cause of war," according to the ancient saying; and a woman's influence, whether it be that of mother, wife, sister, sweetheart, or lost love, has had much to do with the destiny of most men who have accomplished much in the world. They have pulled down and set up; they have steeled men's nerves, or drawn their lifeblood, from Helen of Troy down to the present; this is true in the life of saint, warrior, and artist; a woman's face appears in the life of St. Francis; and it was a woman who unwittingly made John Ruskin the greatest art student the world has ever seen, and who poured into the chalice of his life the only bitter drops that he has had to drink. Truly woman seldom understands her wondrous power, and without a thought wrecks an empire or shatters the royal temple of a great brain, or embitters a mighty heart, being, as Amiel says, "the delight and terror of man, a mystery to all because a mystery to herself." John Ruskin chose from among women one who was beautiful and brilliant, and because he loved her and believed that she loved him, and she believed that also, he made her his wife.

His most intimate friend in those early days was the late Sir John Millais, a rising young painter. Ruskin desired him to paint the portrait of his wife; the companionship of the woman and the painter resulted in a mutual attachment that excluded Ruskin, the husband. That Millais was of a more earthly make, more human than that archangel of the mind, John Ruskin, and the woman was unable to live at the intellectual and spiritual altitude of her husband, may be conjectured. The painter and the woman resolved to act as honorably as could be under the circumstances,