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.
"He seems, to me, quite isolated,--lonely as the desert,--yet never
was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match
his mood. He finds them, but only in the past. He sings, rather than
talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem,
with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning,
some singular epithet, which serves as a _refrain_ when his song is
full, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the
stitches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row.
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