Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/33

 Printing-Societies, and suchlike, they afford a sorrowful kind of pabulum; but for all serious purposes, they are as if non-extant; might as well, if matters are to rest as they are, not have been written or printed at all. The sound of them is not a voice, conveying knowledge or memorial of any earthly or heavenly thing; it is a wide-spread inarticulate slumberous mumblement, issuing as if from the lake of Eternal Sleep. Craving for oblivion, for abolition and honest silence, as a blessing in comparison!—

‘This then,’ continues our impatient friend, ‘is the Elysium we English have provided for our Heroes! The Rushworthian Elysium. Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon’s edge: obscure, in lurid twilight as of the shadow of Death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer;—where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant Pedants, Dilettants, and doleful creatures, by Phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by Nightmares, pasteboard Norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire! There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations, does the Age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our Heroic Ones in memory. By way of sacred poet they have found voluminous Dryasdust, and his Collections and Philosophical Histories.

‘To Dryasdust, who wishes merely to compile torpedo Histories of the philosophical or other sorts, and gain immortal laurels for himself by writing about it and about it, all this is sport; but to us who struggle piously, passionately, to behold, if but in glimpses, the faces of our vanished Fathers, it is death!—O Dryasdust, my voluminous friend, had Human Stupidity continued in the diligent state, think you it had ever come to this? Surely at least you might