Thomas Carlyle

How, then, comes it, may the re­flect­ive mind re­peat, that the grand Tis­sue of all Tis­sues, the only real Tis­sue, should have been quite over­looked by Science—the ves­tural Tis­sue, namely, of wool­len or other cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as its out­most wrap­page and over­all; wherein his whole other Tis­sues are in­cluded and screened, his whole Fa­culties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its be­ing?

Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look be­fore and after: the more sur­pris­ing that we do not look round a little, and see what is passing un­der our very eyes.

It is, after all, a bless­ing that, in these re­volu­tion­ary times, there should be one coun­try where ab­stract Thought can still take shel­ter

As in some chem­ical mix­ture, that has stood long evap­or­at­ing, but would not crys­tal­lise, in­stantly when the wire or other fixed sub­stance is in­tro­duced, crys­tal­lisa­tion com­mences, and rap­idly pro­ceeds till the whole is fin­ished, so was it with the Ed­itor’s mind and this of­fer of Heuschrecke’s.

Of good so­ci­ety Teufels­dröckh ap­pears to have seen little, or has mostly for­got­ten what he saw. He speaks-out with a strange plain­ness; calls many things by their mere dic­tion­ary names.

On the other hand, let us be free to ad­mit, he is the most un­equal writer breath­ing.

Often after some such feat, he will play tru­ant for long pages, and go dawdling and dream­ing, and mum­bling and maun­der­ing the merest com­mon­places, as if he were asleep with eyes open, which in­deed he is.

A man that de­votes his life to learn­ing, shall he not be learned?

For neither in tail­or­ing nor in le­gis­lat­ing does man pro­ceed by mere Ac­ci­dent, but the hand is ever guided on by mys­ter­i­ous op­er­a­tions of the mind.

“But, on the whole,” con­tin­ues our elo­quent Pro­fessor, “Man is a Tool-us­ing An­imal (Handth­i­er­endes thier).