To Carlyle himself the liberation from the old clothes or external casing of belief constituted what he regarded as equivalent to the conversion of the 'old Christian people.' He emerged, he tells us, into a higher atmosphere, and gained a 'constant inward happiness that was quite royal and supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant:' a happiness, he adds, which he never quite lost, though in later years it suffered more frequent eclipse. For this he held himself to be 'endlessly indebted' to Goethe; for Goethe had in his own fashion trod the same path and achieved the same victory. Conversion, as meaning the conscious abandonment of beliefs which have once formed an integral and important part of a man's life, is a process which indeed must be very exceptional with all men of real force of character. Carlyle, it is plain, was so far from undergoing such a process, that he retained much which would have been little in harmony with the teaching of his master. For, whilst everybody can see that Goethe reached a region of philosophic serenity, we must take Carlyle's 'royal and supreme happiness' a little on trust. If his earlier writings have some gleams of the happier mood, we are certainly much more frequently in the region of murky gloom, shrouded by the Tartarean and 'fuliginous' vapours of the lower earth. If his studies of Goethe and German literature opened a door of escape from the narrow prejudices which made the air of Edinburgh oppressive to him, they certainly did not help him to shake off the old Puritan sentiments which were bred in the bone, and no mere external trapping.