Somewhere or other I have spoken of those ‘last enchantments of the Middle Age’ which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were! But there were other voices sounding in our ear besides Newman’s. There was the puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward Irving, then just dead: ‘Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines,—and it took her twelve years!’ A greater voice still,—the greatest voice of the century,—came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe. To this day,—such is the force of youthful associations,—I read the _Wilhelm Meister_ with more pleasure in Carlyle’s translation than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in _Wilhelm Meister_, how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel. But what moved us most in _Wilhelm Meister_ was that which, after all, will always move the young most,—the poetry, the eloquence. Never, surely, was Carlyle’s prose so beautiful and pure as in his rendering of the Youths’ dirge over Mignon!—‘Well is our treasure now laid up, the fair image of the past. Here sleeps it in the marble, undecaying; in your hearts, also, it lives, it works. Travel, travel, back into life! Take along with you this holy earnestness, for earnestness alone makes life eternity.’ Here we had the voice of the great Goethe;—not the stiff, and hindered, and frigid, and factitious Goethe who speaks to us too often from those sixty volumes of his, but of the great Goethe, and the true one.