he spent five miserable years, of which his own record is:  “I was without friends, experience, or connection in the sphere of human business, was of sly humor, proud enough and to spare, and had begun my long curriculum of dyspepsia.”  This nagging illness was the cause of much of that irritability of temper which frequently led him to scold the public, and for which he has been harshly handled by unfriendly critics.

The period following his university course was one of storm and stress for Carlyle.  Much to the grief of the father whom he loved, he had given up the idea of entering the ministry.  Wherever he turned, doubts like a thick fog surrounded him,—­doubts of God, of his fellow-men, of human progress, of himself.  He was poor, and to earn an honest living was his first problem.  He tried successively teaching school, tutoring, the study of law, and writing miscellaneous articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia.  All the while he was fighting his doubts, living, as he says, “in a continual, indefinite, pining fear.”  After six or seven years of mental agony, which has at times a suggestion of Bunyan’s spiritual struggle, the crisis came in 1821, when Carlyle suddenly shook off his doubts and found himself.  “All at once,” he says in Sartor, “there arose a thought in me, and I asked myself:  ’What Art thou afraid of?  Wherefore like a coward dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling?  Despicable biped!  What is the sum total of the worst that lies before thee?  Death?  Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee!  Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee?  Let it come then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever.”  This struggle between fear and faith, and the triumph of the latter, is recorded in two remarkable chapters, “The Everlasting No” and “The Everlasting Yea,” of Sartor Resartus.

Carlyle now definitely resolved on a literary life, and began with any work that offered a bare livelihood.  He translated Legendre’s Geometry from the French, wrote numerous essays for the magazines, and continued his study of German while making translations from that language.  His translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister Appeared in 1824, his Life of Schiller in 1825, and his Specimens of German Romance in 1827.  He began at this time a correspondence with Goethe, his literary hero, which lasted till the German poet’s death in 1832.  While still busy with “hack work,” Carlyle, in 1826, married Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful woman, whose literary genius almost equaled that of her husband.  Soon afterwards, influenced chiefly by poverty, the Carlyles retired to a farm, at Craigen-puttoch