We are now close on to the cardinal fact of Carlyle's life and teachings, namely, the urgency of his quest for heroes and heroic qualities. This is the master key to him; the main stress of his preaching and writing is here. He is the medium and exemplar of the value of personal force and prowess, and he projected this thought into current literature and politics, with the emphasis of gunpowder and torpedoes. He had a vehement and overweening conceit in man. A sort of anthropomorphic greed and hunger possessed him always, an insatiable craving for strong, picturesque characters, and for contact and conflict with them. This was his ruling passion (and it amounted to a passion) all his days. He fed his soul on heroes and heroic qualities, and all his literary exploits were a search for these things. Where he found them not, where he did not come upon some trace of them in books, in society, in politics, he saw only barrenness and futility. He was an idealist who was inhospitable to ideas; he must have a man, the flavor and stimulus of ample concrete personalities. "In the country," he said, writing to his brother in 1821, "I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land." His faculties were "up in mutiny, and slaying one another for lack of fair enemies." He must to the city, to Edinburgh, and finally to London, where, thirteen years later, we find his craving as acute as ever. "Oct. 1st. This morning think of the old primitive Edinburgh scheme of _engineership_; almost meditate for a moment resuming it _yet_! It were a method of gaining bread, of getting into contact with men, my two grand wants and prayers." Nothing but man, but heroes, touched him, moved him, satisfied him. He stands for heroes and hero-worship, and for that alone. Bring him the most plausible theory, the most magnanimous idea in the world, and he is cold, indifferent, or openly insulting; but bring him a brave, strong man, or the reminiscence of any noble personal trait,--sacrifice, obedience, reverence,--and every faculty within him stirs and responds. Dreamers and enthusiasts, with their schemes for the millennium, rushed to him for aid and comfort, and usually had the door slammed in their faces. They forgot it was a man he had advertised for, and not an idea. Indeed, if you had the blow-fly of any popular ism or reform buzzing in your bonnet, No. 5 Cheyne Row was the house above all others to be avoided; little chance of inoculating such a mind as Carlyle's with your notions,--of _blowing_ a toiling and sweating hero at his work. But welcome to any man with real work to do and the courage to do it; welcome to any man who stood for any real, tangible thing in his own right. "In God's name, what _art_ thou? Not Nothing, sayest thou! Then, How much and what? This is the thing I would know, and even _must_ soon know, such a pass am I come to!" ("Past and Present.")