had admiring acquaintances in every walk of life:
aristocrats like Milnes and the Ashburtons, Radicals
like the Bullers, Mazzini and John Forster, church-
men like Thirlwall and Wilberforce, men of science
like Tyndall and Huxley, men of letters like Tenny-
son, Fitzgerald, Browning, Thackeray, Ruskin, Nor-
ton, counted themselves among his intimates. But
they all knew well enough that in the recesses of his
soul he dwelt apart. It was his nature, and he was
incapable of change. More than most men, he had
a sense of what Swift called the transiency and
vanity of all earthly things. With Andrew Marvell
he could say:

"At my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near."

He wrote in his Journal for 1854: "Time! Death!
All-devouring Time! This thought 'Exeunt om-
nes,' and how the generations are like crops of
grass, temporary, very, and all vanishes, as it were
an apparition and a ghost: these things, though half
a century old in me, possess my mind as they never
did before." Many of Carlyle's sublimest passages
in Sartor and elsewhere, sound this note of trans-
iency: "Time's winged chariot hurrying near,"
perceived by the supersensitive ear of a solitary.

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