Critics have spoken as though Carlyle had become a disciple of some school of German metaphysics. It is, doubtless, true enough that he valued the great German thinkers as representing to his mind a victorious reaction against the scepticism of Hume, or the materialism of Hume's French successors. But he sympathised with the general tendency without caring to bewilder himself in any of the elaborate systems evolved by Kant or his followers. The reader, he says in the earlier essay on Novalis, 'would err widely who supposed that this transcendental system of metaphysics was a mere intellectual card-castle, or logical hocus-pocus ... without any bearing on the practical interests of men. On the contrary ... it is the most serious in its purport of all philosophies propounded in these latter ages;' and he proceeds to indicate their purport, and to hint, as one writing for uncongenial readers, his respect for German 'mysticism.' He thought, that is, that these mystics, transcendentalists, and so forth, were vindicating faith against scepticism, idealism against materialism, a belief in the divine order against atheistic negations; and, moreover, that their fundamental creed was inexpugnable, resting on a basis of solid reason instead of outworn dogma. As for the superstructure, the systems of this or that wonderful professor to explain the universe in general, he probably held them to be 'card-castles'—mere cobwebs of the brain—at best arid, tentative gropings in the right direction. He had far too much of true Scottish shrewdness—even in the higher regions of thought—to trust body or soul to the truth of such flimsy materials. This comes out in his view of Coleridge, who so far sympathised with him as to have imbibed consolation from the same sources. No reader of the life of Sterling can forget the chapter—one of the most vivid portraits ever drawn even by Carlyle—devoted to Coleridge as the oracle of the 'innumerable brave souls' still engaged in the London turmoil—a portrait which suggests incidentally how much was left unspoken in the hastier touches of the 'Reminiscences.' We can see the oracle not answering your questions, nor decidedly setting out towards an answer, but accumulating 'formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear for setting out; ending by losing himself in the morass and in the mazes of theosophic philosophy,' where now and then 'glorious islets' would rise out of the haze, only to be lost again in the surrounding gloom. In his talk, as in him, 'a ray of heavenly inspiration struggled in a tragically ineffectual degree against the weakness of flesh and blood.' He had 'skirted the deserts of infidelity,' but 'had not had the courage, in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across such deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond.' Many disciples have of course seen more in