Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 22 (US).djvu/133

 tised was a little volume entitled On the Evergreen of our Feelings; and in November (1825), news came that Richter was dead; and a heart which we had figured as one of the truest, deepest and gentlest that ever lived in this world, was to beat no more.

Of Richter's private character I have learned little; but that little was all favourable, and accordant with the indications in his works. Of his public and intellectual character much might be said and thought; for the secret of it is by no means floating on the surface, and it will reward some study. The most cursory inspection, even an external one, will satisfy us that he neither was, nor wished to be considered as, a man who wrote or thought in the track of other men, to whom common practices of law, and whose excellences and defects the common formulas of criticism will easily represent. The very titles of his works are startling. One of his earliest performances is named Selection from the Papers of the Devil; another is Biographical Recreations under the Cranium of a Giantess. His novels are almost uniformly introduced by some fantastic narrative accounting for his publication and obtainment of the story. Hesperus, his chief novel, bears the secondary title of Dog-post-days, and the chapters are named Dog-posts, as having been conveyed to him in a letter-bag, round the neck of a little nimble Shock, from some unknown Island in the South Sea.

The first aspect of these peculiarities cannot prepossess us in his favour; we are too forcibly reminded of theatrical clap-traps and literary quackery; nor on opening one of the works themselves is the case much mended. Piercing gleams of thought do not escape us; singular truths conveyed in a form as singular; grotesque and often truly ludicrous delineations; pathetic, magnificent, far-sounding passages; effusions full of wit, knowledge and imagination, but difficult to bring under any rubric whatever; all the elements, in short, of a glorious intellect, but dashed together In such wild arrangement, that their order seems the very ideal of confusion.