that he said: "I still find more in Goethe about all high things than in any other. His gleams come now from a line, or even a word, or next a scrap of poetry. He did not believe in a gray-haired Sovereign seated in the heavens, but in the Supreme Laws. A loyal soul! Concerning things unknown he has spoken the best word-Entsagung. In thinking about immortality, we jump to selfish conclusions, and support them as if they were piety: even if we sanctify our conclusion by associating with it our departed friends and clinging affections, it is something you want. But nothing can be known. Goethe says-Entsagung. Submission! Renunciation! That is near to it. I studied the word long before I knew what he meant by it; but I know there is such a thing as rising to that state of mind, and that it is the best. Shall it be as I wish? It shall be as it is. So, and not otherwise. To any and every conceivable result the loyal man can and will adapt himself; face that possibility until he becomes its equal; and when any clear idea is reached, bend to that till it becomes ideal. Entsagung shall then mean, 'tis best even so!"

A characteristic of Carlyle was his sympathetic interest in all animal life. Often when walking in the park he would pause to observe the sparrows which, hardly getting out of the way, would pertly turn their heads and look at him as landlords might

observe a suspicious character trespassing upon their estate. This seemed to amuse him much. He had always a severe anathema for vivisection, and all cruelty to animals. "Never can I forget the horror with which I once saw a living mouse put into the cage of a rattlesnake in the Zoological Gardens, to be luncheon for that reptile. The serpent fixed upon it his hard glittering eyes, and the poor little creature stood paralyzed, trembling with terror. It seemed to me a cruelty utterly unjustifiable, and one to be unceasingly protested against." The compassion of Burns for the field-mouse, whose home and hopes his plough had overthrown, was in Carlyle's tone of voice in this and much else that he said concerning his humble contemporaries of the animal world. No reader of "Sartor Resartus" can lose the image of the little boy at Ecclefechan, therein called Entepfuhl, dreaming over the migration and return of the swallows. "Why mention our Swallows, which, out of far Africa, as I learned, threading their way over seas and mountains, corporate cities and belligerent nations, yearly found themselves, with the month of May, snug lodged in our Cottage Lobby? The hospitable Father (for cleanliness' sake) had fixed a little bracket plumb under their nest: there they built, caught flies, and twittered, and bred; and all, I chiefly, loved them. Bright, nimble creatures, who taught you the mason-craft; nay, stranger still,

gave you a masonic incorporation, almost social police? For if, by ill chance, and when time pressed, your House fell, have I not seen five neighborly Helpers appear next day, and swashing to and fro, with animated, loud, long-drawn chirpings, and activity almost super-hirundine, complete it again before nightfall?" This picture rose again before me one day when Carlyle was speaking of an experience of the philosopher Kant, when he was walking in a wood, near the wall of a ruin. He heard a clamor among the swallows, high up on the wall, so loud that it made him pause. The birds were in shrill debate about something. Presently there was a pause, then a long, low, plaintive note from one of them; and immediately thereafter a nestling, not yet able to fly, fell to the ground. Kant concluded that the debate was that of a council which decreed that there was not nest-room or food enough for all the little ones; one must be sacrificed; and the one low, plaintive note was that of the mother submitting to the fatal conclusion. Kant picked up the fallen swallow, which was not yet dead, and looked into its eye. How deep it was! As he gazed in it he seemed to be looking into an infinite depth, a mystical vista. "This struggle for existence," said Carlyle," of which our scientific men say so much, is infinitely sad. We see it all around us. Our human reptiles are outcomes of it. Somebody told me of a

subtle fellow, a small lad, who heard a poor rustic, warned to take care of his money in the crowd, say he had only a pound and meant to keep it in his mouth. Soon after the street-boy crosses the poor man's path, and sets up a cry, 'You give me my money! A crowd having gathered, the boy explains that he had been sent by his poor mother with a sovereign to buy something, had fallen, and as the money rolled away the man had picked it up and put it in his mouth. The crowd cried 'Shame!' and he from the country had to disgorge and get home as he could. The story is credible of a boy struggling for existence in this vast abyss of greed and want. Survival of the fittest! Much that they write about it appears to me anything but desirable. I was reading lately some speculations which seemed to be fine white flour, but I presently found it was pulverized glass I had got into my mouth-no nourishment in it at all, but the reverse. What they call Evolution is no new doctrine. I can remember when Erasmus Darwin's 'Zoonomia' was still supplying subjects for discussion, and there was a debate among the students whether man were descended from an oyster or a cabbage. I believe the oyster carried the day. That the weak and incompetent pass away, while the strong and adequate prevail and continue, appears true enough in animal and in human history; but there are mysteries in life, and in the uni

verse, not explained by that discovery. They should be approached with reverence. An irreverent mind is really a senseless mind. I have always said that I would rather have written those pages in Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister' about the 'Three Reverences' than all the novels which have appeared in my day."

IX.

Notwithstanding his affection for Professor Tyndall, Carlyle, in scientific matters, clung to the great masters of the past, such as Faraday, for many years his personal friend, and Franklin. He often spoke of Franklin as America's greatest man, and told good anecdotes of him; among others, one I had not heard, of his going to see a church-steeple at Streatham, near London, which had been struck by lightning. Franklin predicted that, if rebuilt in the same way, the steeple would be again struck-and that was just what happened.

The hostility which his father manifested towards all works of fiction (as "downright lies ") turned, in Carlyle, to the very severe standard of veracity by which he judged all such works. He had an admiration for Charles Dickens, especially after hearing that author read some of his own works. He could, he said, hardly recall any theatrical representation he had witnessed in which the whole company had exhibited more variety of effect than came from the