gradations in his mind were so steep; the descent from the thought to the deed was so swift and inevitable that the witty advocate came to look upon him as a man to be avoided. "Daily and hourly," he says (at the age of thirty-eight), "the world natural grows more of a world magical to me; this is as it should be. Daily, too, I see that there is no true poetry but in _reality_." "The gist of my whole way of thought," he says again, "is to raise the natural to the supernatural." To his brother John he wrote in 1832: "I get more earnest, graver, not unhappier, every day. The whole creation seems more and more divine to me, the natural more and more supernatural." His eighty-five years did not tame him at all, did not blunt his conception of the "fearfulness and wonderfulness of life." Sometimes an opiate or an anæsthetic operates inversely upon a constitution, and, instead of inducing somnolence, makes the person wildly wakeful and sensitive. The anodyne of life acted this way upon Carlyle, and, instead of quieting or benumbing him, filled him with portentous imaginings and fresh cause for wonder. There is a danger that such a mind, if it takes to literature, will make a mess of it. But Carlyle is saved by his tremendous gripe upon reality. Do I say the ideal and the real were one with him? He made the ideal _the_ real, and the only real. Whatever he touched he made tangible, actual, and vivid. Ideas are hurled like rocks, a word blisters like a branding-iron, a metaphor transfixes like a javelin. There is something in his sentences that lays hold of things, as the acids bite metals. His subtle thoughts, his marvelous wit, like the viewless gases of the chemist, combine with a force that startles the reader.