Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were becoming more numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my head a little up,” he says, “translating _Legendre’s Geometry_ for Brewster; my outlook somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the preceding year, it appears from private letters, he had been exerting himself indefatigably to find literary work. Thus, in a letter of date March 1821 to an old college friend: “I have had about twenty plans this winter in the way of authorship: they have all failed. I have about twenty more to try; and, if it does but please the Director of all things to continue the moderate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding. My _petards_ will not burst, or make only _noise_ when they do. I must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they shall burst, and do execution too.”[38] Again, in a letter of the very next month: “I am moving on, weary and heavy-laden, with very fickle health, and many discomforts,—still looking forward to the future (brave future!) for all the accommodation and enjoyment that render life an object of desire. _Then_ shall I no longer play a candle-snuffer’s part in the great drama; or, if I do, my salary will be raised.”[39] From Mr. Froude we learn that one of the burst petards of 1821 had been the proposal to a London publishing firm of a complete translation of Schiller’s Works. That offer having been declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle speaks, the only obvious increase of his literary engagements at the time of the beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it would appear, in that connection with the _New Edinburgh Review_ of which mention has been already made, and in the translation of _Legendre_ which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in the background. There is significance in the fact that his second contribution to the _New Edinburgh_, published in April 1822, when the Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s _Faust_. The German readings which had been going on since 1819 had influenced him greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for German Literature. Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the demigods of his intellectual worship, the authors in whose works, rather than in those of any of the same century in France or Britain, he found suitable nutriment for his own spirit. He had proposed, we see, to translate the whole of Schiller. Of his studies in Goethe and their effects we have a striking commemoration in the passage of his _Reminiscences_ where he tells of that “windless, Scotch-misty, Saturday night,” apparently just about our present date, when, having finished the reading of _Wilhelm Meister_, he walked through the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation over the wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he had a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him.