But to others, and especially to the younger men, this new writer came, opening up unknown worlds of beauty and wonder. A strange influence, unlike any other, attracted us to his writing. Before we knew his name, we knew _him_. We could recognize an article by our new author as soon as we opened the pages of the Foreign Review, Edinburgh, or Westminster, and read a few paragraphs. But it was not the style, though marked by a singular freedom and originality--not the tone of kindly humor, the good-natured irony, the happy illustrations brought from afar,--not the amount of literary knowledge, the familiarity with German, French, Italian, Spanish literature,--not any or all of these which so bewitched us. We knew a young man who used to walk from a neighboring town to Boston every week, in order to read over again two articles by Carlyle in two numbers of the Foreign Review lying on a table in the reading-room of the Athenæum. This was his food, in the strength of which he could go a week, till hunger drove him back to get another meal at the same table. We knew other young men and young women who taught themselves German in order to read for themselves the authors made so luminous by this writer. Those were counted fortunate who possessed the works of our author, as yet unpublished in America,--his "Life of Schiller," his "German Romance," his Review articles. What, then, was the charm,--whence the fascination? To explain this we must describe a little the state of literature and opinion in this vicinity at the time when Carlyle's writings first made their appearance.