Coleridge; but even his warmest admirers must admit the general truth of the picture, and confess that if Coleridge cast a leaven of much virtue into modern English speculation, he never succeeded in working out a downright answer to the philosophical perplexities of his day, or in promulgating a distinct rule of faith or life. To Carlyle this was enough to condemn Coleridge as a teacher. Coleridge, in his view, failed because he adhered to the 'old clothes;' tried desperately to breathe life into dead creeds; and, encumbered with such burdens, could not make the effort necessary to cross the 'desert.' He lingered fatally round the starting-point, and succeeded only in starting 'strange spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimeras which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner.' The judgment is in many ways characteristic of Carlyle. To the genuine Puritan a creed is nothing which does not immediately embody itself in a war-cry. It must have a direct forcible application to life. It must divide light from darkness, distinguish friends from enemies—both external and internal—nerve your arms for the battle, and plant your feet on solid standing-ground. It must be no flickering ray in the midst of gloom, but a steady, unquenchable light—a permanent 'star to every wandering bark.' Coleridge would stimulate only to uncertain musings, instead of animating to strenuous endeavour. The same sentiment utters itself in Carlyle's favourite exaltation of silence above speech—a phrase paradoxical if literally taken, but in substance an emphatic assertion of the futility of the uncertain meanderings in the regions of abstract speculation which hinder a man from girding himself at once to deadly wrestle with the powers of darkness.