THERE is one imaginative prose writer whose influence was so wide-
spread, and who had so much to do with the dissemination among
poets of the German romantic feeling for nature, that we cannot
afford to pass him by without some brief consideration. Carlyle
was eagerly read by poets like Emerson, Whitman, Meredith, and
even, I believe, by Longfellow, and served particularly as a means
of passing on to them in popular form certain elements in the thought
of Goethe and of the German transcendental philosophers.

Carlyle indulged little in the description of natural scenery and
outdoor life. But in his early essays on German literature, on
Richter and Goethe, he gives a notion of the romantic tone of Ger-
man writing about nature. And there is one glowing passage in
Sartor Resartus, in which an account of wild mountain scenery is
made the occasion to strike nearly every possible note of the roman-
tic philosophy of nature. It is in the chapter on the Sorrows of
Teufelsdröckh, and serves to exhibit the solace and elevation which
nature may bring to the heart of sad and disenchanted mortals.

A hundred and a hundred savage peaks, in the last light of Day; all
glowing, of gold and amethyst, like giant spirits of the wilderness;
there in their silence, in their solitude, even as on the night when
Noah's deluge first dried! Beautiful, nay solemn, was the sudden aspect
to our Wanderer. He gazed over these stupendous masses with wonder,
almost with longing desire; never till this hour had he known Nature,
that she was One, that she was his Mother and divine. And as the ruddy
glow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the Sun had now de-
parted, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of Death and of Life,
stole through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life were one, as if
the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had its throne in
that splendor, and his own spirit were therewith holding communion. ¹

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