Carlyle took the world of great men for his province. His Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Frederick, have a somewhat closer resemblance to their historical originals than Shakespeare's Hamlet bears to the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet who accomplished an unhesitating revenge, married two wives, and died in battle: yet into his chosen heroes Carlyle projected himself as passionately as Shakespeare projected himself into Macbeth and Lear, and his Cagliostro is as sympathetically drawn as his Burns. But men reject Carlyledom. Willing enough, temporarily, to worship themselves in Mahomet or Cromwell, they find the cult of great men so pursued to end in all unhappiness; which is intolerable. Two men did try to live in Carlyledom--Ruskin and Froude: and the end of them was asphyxiation: Carlyle had exhausted the air: they had only his breath to breathe. Carlyledom is a strait-jacket for the world, and a dusty way to death and to the dull hell of the drill-sergeant and the knout. "Declined with thanks," says mankind. Wordsworth's worship was of a higher strain than Carlyle's. He projected his own beauty of soul and his own strength of character into the world and into the universe. Tenderly he enters the delight of the daffodils: through the mountains he smites his powerful spirit. Into all beauty and into all grandeur he pours his own love and greatness, now an "eternal soul" clothed with the "unwearied joy" of the brook "dancing down its waterbreaks," now apparelled in "the Mighty Being" that "doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder everlastingly."