Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning. Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator. Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_ and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation would involve a course of Metaphysics.