"God's Will be Done!" 367 while Germany waited for the tidings as if he had been one of her own sons. Generally the news was, that he had passed a quiet night, and that his general condition remained the same. Thus was it for many days. On Thursday morning, the 3d of February, the doctor found him in a drowsy state, moaning now and then in his sleep. He was almost pulseless, and in such an extremely exhausted condition that it was feared the heart's action might cease at any moment. So he continued till five o'clock on Friday evening, when he became unconscious, his respiration being extremely feeble, and the heart's action barely perceptible. Thus he lingered through the night; and on the morning of Saturday, the 5th, about half-past eight o'clock, he breathed his last. During the previous thirty-six hours he had suffered no pain. Dr Maclagan was in attendance when the end was drawing nigh, but medical skill was of no avail. His niece, the constant companion of all his widowed years, and who had been to him as the most loving of daughters, was with him to the last. He had suffered from no organic disease; his life had gradually burnt itself out, and he died from a general failure of vital power. Next day, in Westminster Abbey, Dean Stanley told his congregation of "one tender expression-one plaintive yet manful thought-written but three or four years ago," that had not yet reached the public eye; and which it was grateful, most of all in such an hour, to hearthough it took by surprise no one who really knew Carlyle. "Three nights ago, stepping out after midnight and looking up at the stars, which were clear and numerous, it struck me with a strange new kind of feeling. 'In a little while I shall have seen you also for the last time. God Almighty's own Theatre of Immensity, the Infinite made palpable and visible to me. That also will be closed, flung to in my face, and I shall never behold it any more.' The thought of this eternal deprivation, even of this, though this is such a nothing in comparison, was sad and painful to me. And then a second feeling rose in me: What if Omnipotence, that has developed in me those pieties, those reverences, and infinite affections, should actually have said, 'Yes, poor mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted to go further. Hope; despair not. God's will, God's will, not ours, be done."" THE CHAPTER XXIV. "PAUSE OF SORROWFUL STILLNESS -TRIBUTES OF THE world, it was truly said by the chief reflector of the feeling of England, seemed duller and colder, that one grey old man at Chelsea had faded away from among us. As another powerful journal remarked, it was a striking testimony to the greatness of Carlyle's position, that men were almost as much impressed by the tidings of his death as if he had been taken in the midst of his career. His work had been finished nearly fifteen years beforeno more was expected from him; yet every educated Briton, and even many of the manual toilers in our nation, felt that they had lost something by the disappearance of a writer to whom they owed so much. He had passed away in a season of almost fierce political conflict, but for the moment even the leaders in the strife became oblivious of its heats and distractions-there had come, as one of these leaders finely remarked, "a pause of sorrowful stillness" in the minds of all men. At the recollection of the brave old worker who had gone to his rest, of his noble character, of his magnificent work, "the battles of the hour seemed but pale skirmishes." Nor did the fact pass unnoted, that while the parliamentary government of which he had said so many hard things was in the very crisis of one of its most trying struggles, he was gently sinking away from it all, setting out on the voyage to the still country, "where, beyond these voices, there is peace." Never was the press of Great Britain more unanimous than in the testimony which it bore respecting Thomas Carlyle. On all hands, by the organs of every political party and of every church, it was conceded that he had been the greatest and most heroic man of letters of our time, and that he had left his traces more deeply than any single Englishman on the moral character of the nineteenth century. The organ of the fashionable world of London pointed to the humble station in which he was born as an incitement to ambition. The son of a small Scottish farmer, he had died regretted and mourned by an entire nation. The representative of the most advanced Liberalism contended that he had never been an idolator of mere brute, selfish force, for he placed Cromwell above Napoleon; he believed in the divinity of strength, but only in the strength which is strong in rectitude and self-denying in labour. His cynicism had nothing in common with the cynicism of this materialistic. age; his stern Hebraism scorned the modern Hellenists, and it was impossible that he could be the prophet of modern aristocracies. The Scottish journals mourned the departure of "the greatest Scotsman of his generation," one worthy to be ranked with John Knox and Robert Burns, in some respects to be placed above even The Tributes of the Press. 371 them; and pointed with pardonable pride to his personal character, fruit of the wholesome training in that peasanthome of Annandale, as constituting perhaps the truest element of his greatness. The people of the little land that lies north the Tweed might be excused if they felt their hearts swell as they read in the most influential organ of British public opinion, that their newly-departed compatriot was a man who had educated himself in the art of plain living and high thinking, before he presumed to educate others, and who, when he had become famous, as while he was obscure, never taught the world lessons which he had not first made part of his own being. As was to be expected, the press of Germany vied with that of Britain in doing honour to the memory of Carlyle, as also did the press of England's daughter, the Great Republic across the sea, generously forgiving the many hard words he had used in speaking of her. The press of Italy did not fail to render justice to the old friend of Mazzini, praising him both as a writer and as a man; from France alone came the one discordant note. There the Republican journalists reciprocated the feeling of dislike with which he had viewed their country; their verdict was distinctly unfavourable, and obviously coloured by political resentment. They defined him as "a Scotchman of an age anterior to Burns, a Scot of the Covenant and Old Testament," who judged Diderot and Danton according to the Covenanters' standard; and declared that nothing could be looked for from a man who took his standpoint on the Cromwellian dictatorship in criticising parliamentarism, industrialism, and all that is great and small in modern civilization. Hero-worship and hatred of French sensualism blinded. |