“’These are but opinions to Carlyle, but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death.’

“All Carlyle’s talk, that evening, was a defence of mere force,—­success the test of right;—­if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks;—­find a hero, and let them be his slaves, &c.  It was very Titanic, and anti-celestial.  I wish the last evening had been more melodious.  However, I bid Carlyle farewell with feelings of the warmest friendship and admiration.  We cannot feel otherwise to a great and noble nature, whether it harmonise with our own or not.  I never appreciated the work he has done for his age till I saw England.  I could not.  You must stand in the shadow of that mountain of shams, to know how hard it is to cast light across it.

“Honour to Carlyle! Hoch!  Although, in the wine with which we drink this health, I, for one, must mingle the despised ‘rose-water.’

“And now, having to your eye shown the defects of my own mind, in the sketch of another, I will pass on more lowly,—­more willing to be imperfect, since Fate permits such noble creatures, after all, to be only this or that.  It is much if one is not only a crow or magpie;—­Carlyle is only a lion.  Some time we may, all in full, be intelligent and humanely fair.”

* * * * *

“December, 1846.—­Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes.  He does not converse;—­only harangues.  It is the usual misfortune of such marked men,—­happily not one invariable or inevitable,—­that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.

“Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority,—­raising his voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound.  This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others.  On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought.  But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase.  Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness,—­no self-love.  It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror;—­it is his nature, and the untameable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons.  You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near.