and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctly before Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter better known to them.  And it pleased him to write about “Corn-law rhymes.”  That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done, by the side of them, the then more urgent task.  In 1828, Mr. Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of “Goethe’s Helena,” which is a kind of episode in the second part of “Faust,” and was first published as a fragment.  This takes up more than sixty pages in the first volume of the “Miscellanies,” about the half being translations from “Helena,” which by no means stands in the front rank of Goethe’s poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high artistic composition than a creation.  At that time there lay, almost uncalled for, on the publisher’s shelf, where it had lain for five years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of Shakespeare,—­a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender, deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with excess of light,—­or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed of Nature’s most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and a richer fragrance; I mean the “Adonais” of Shelley.  For this glittering masterpiece,—­a congenial commentary on which would have illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,—­Mr. Carlyle had no word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for Wordsworth.  For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it is:  “Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague, random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty.”  A parenthesis, short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power, variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first class of the poetry of the world.  Is not Thomas Carlyle justly chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor?  Nay, considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his offense may be termed a literary crime.  He knew better.