Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ... whining sorrow ... but grim defiance. Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:-- I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce, upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago.... Oh! little did my mother think, That day she cradled me, The lands that I should travel in, The death I was to dee. My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain. How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself, sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health, health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are greater than I am able to bear. Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun, according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822, and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum of L50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap." But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in 1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly