struggling and wrestling which he had inherited was always uppermost. It seems as if the travail and yearning of his mother had passed upon him as a birthmark. The universe was madly rushing about him, seeking to engulf him. Things assumed threatening and spectral shapes. There was little joy or serenity for him. Every task he proposed to himself was a struggle with chaos and darkness, real or imaginary. He speaks of "Frederick" as a nightmare; the "Cromwell business" as toiling amid mountains of dust. I know of no other man in literature with whom the sense of labor is so tangible and terrible. That vast, grim, struggling, silent, inarticulate array of ancestral force that lay in him, when the burden of written speech was laid upon it, half rebelled, and would not cease to struggle and be inarticulate. There was a plethora of power: a channel, as through rocks, had to be made for it, and there was an incipient cataclysm whenever a book was to be written. What brings joy and buoyancy to other men, namely, a genial task, brought despair and convulsions to him. It is not the effort of composition,--he was a rapid and copious writer and speaker,--but the pressure of purpose, the friction of power and velocity, the sense of overcoming the demons and mud-gods and frozen torpidity he so often refers to. Hence no writing extant is so little like writing, and gives so vividly the sense of something _done_. He may praise silence and glorify work. The unspeakable is ever present with him; it is the core of every sentence: the inarticulate is round about him; a solitude like that of space encompasseth him. His books are not easy reading; they are a kind of wrestling to most persons. His style is like a road made of rocks: when it is good, there is nothing like it; and when it is bad, there is nothing like it! In "Past and Present" Carlyle has unconsciously painted his own life and character in truer colors than has any one else: "Not a May-game is this man's life, but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers; no idle promenade through fragrant orange groves and green, flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning, sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men with inexpressible soft pity, as they _cannot_ love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendors, the Archdemons and Archangels. All heaven, all pandemonium, are his escort." Part of the world will doubtless persist in thinking that pandemonium furnished his chief counsel and guide; but there are enough who think otherwise, and their numbers are bound to increase in the future. IV A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE