Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 22 (US).djvu/136

 and the lowest, he can play at bowls with the sun and moon. His Imagination opens for us the Land of Dreams; we sail with him through the boundless abyss, and the secrets of Space, and Time, and Life, and Annihilation hover round us in dim cloudy forms, and darkness and immensity and dread encompass and overshadow us. Nay, in handling the smallest matter, he works it with the tools of a giant. A common truth is wrenched from its old combinations, and presented us in new, impassable, abyssmal contrast with its opposite error. A trifle, some slender character, some weakling humorist, some jest, or quip, or spiritual toy, is shaped into most quaint, yet often truly living form; but shaped somehow as with the hammer of Vulcan, with three strokes that might have helped to forge an Ægis. The treasures of his mind are of a similar description with the mind itself; his knowledge is gathered from all the kingdoms of Art and Science and Nature, and lies round him in huge unwieldy heaps. His very language is Titanian; deep, strong, tumultuous, shining with a thousand hues, fused from a thousand elements, and winding in labyrinthic mazes.

Among Richter's gifts, perhaps the first that strikes us as truly great is his Imagination; for he loves to dwell in the loftiest and most solemn provinces of thought; his works abound with mysterious allegories, visions and typical adumbrations; his Dreams, in particular, have a gloomy vastness, broken here and there by wild far-darting splendour, and shadowy forms of meaning rise dimly from the bosom of the void Infinite. Yet, if I mistake not, Humour is his ruling quality, the quality which lives most deeply in his inward nature, and most strongly influences his manner of being. In this rare gift,—for none is rarer than true humour,—he stands unrivalled in his own country; and among late writers, in every other. To describe humour is difficult at all times, and would perhaps be still more difficult in Richter's case. Like all his other qualities, it is vast, rude, irregular; often perhaps overstrained and extravagant; yet fundamentally it is