Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/40

 and bad to fight on the Devil’s side! The essence of all Heroisms and Veracities that have been, or that will be.—Perhaps it was among the nobler and noblest Human Heroisms, this Puritanism of ours: but English Dryasdust could not discern it for a Heroism at all;—as the Heaven’s lightning, born of its black tempest, and destructive to pestilential Mud-giants, is mere horror and terror to the Pedant species everywhere; which, like the owl in any sudden brightness, has to shut its eyes,—or hastily procure smoked-spectacles on an improved principle. Heaven’s brightness would be intolerable otherwise. Only your eagle dares look direct into the fire-radiance; only your Schiller climbs aloft “to discover whence the lightning is coming.” “Godlike men love lightning,” says one. Our old Norse fathers called it a God; the sunny blue-eyed Thor, with his all-conquering thunderhammer,—who again, in calmer season, is beneficent Summer-heat. Godless men love it not; shriek murder when they see it; shutting their eyes, and hastily procuring smoked-spectacles. O Dryasdust, thou art great and thrice-great!’— —

‘But, alas,’ exclaims he elsewhere, getting his eye on the real nodus of the matter, ‘what is it, all this Rushworthian inarticulate rubbish-continent, in its ghastly dim twilight, with its haggard wrecks and pale shadows; what is it, but the common Kingdom of Death? This is what we call Death, this mouldering dumb wilderness of things once alive. Behold here the final evanescence of Formed human things; they had form, but they are changing into sheer formlessness;—ancient human speech itself has sunk into unintelligible maundering. This is the collapse,—the etiolation of human features into mouldy blank; dissolution; progress towards utter silence and disappearance; disastrous ever-deepening Dusk of Gods and Men!— —Why has the living ventured thither, down from the cheerful light, across the Lethe-swamps and Tartarean Phlegethons, onwards to these baleful halls of Dis and the three-headed Dog? Some Destiny drives him. It is his sins, I suppose:—perhaps it is his love, strong as that of