Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 22 (US).djvu/139

 pains to reproduce and illustrate in his West-östlichter Divan. The mildness, the warm all-comprehending love attributed to Oriental poets may in fact be discovered in Richter; not less their fantastic exaggeration, their brilliant extravagance; above all, their overflowing abundance, their lyrical diffuseness, as if writing for readers who were altogether passive, to whom no sentiment could be intelligible unless it were expounded and dissected, and presented under all its thousand aspects. In this last point Richter is too much an Oriental: his passionate outpourings would often be more effective were they far briefer. Withal, however, he is a Western Oriental: he lives in the midst of cultivated Europe in the nineteenth century; he has looked with a patient and piercing eye on its motley aspect; and it is this Europe, it is the changes of its many-coloured life, that are held up to us in his works. His subject is Life; his chosen study has been Man. Few have known the world better, or taken at once a clearer and a kindlier view of its concerns. For Richter's mind is at peace with itself: a mild, humane, beneficent spirit breathes through his works. His very contempt, of which he is by no means incapable or sparing, is placid and tolerant; his affection is warm, tender, comprehensive, not dwelling among the high places of the world, not blind to its objects when found among the poor and lowly. Nature in all her scenes and manifestations he loves with a deep, almost passionate love; from the solemn phases of the starry heaven to the simple floweret of the meadow, his eye and his heart are open for her charms and her mystic meanings. From early years, he tells us, he may be said to have almost lived under the open sky: here he could recreate himself, here he studied, here he often wrote. It is not with the feeling of a mere painter and viewhunter that he looks on Nature: but he dwells amid her beauties and solemnities as in the mansion of a Mother; he finds peace in her majestic peace; he worships, in this boundless Temple, the great original of Peace, to whom the Earth and the fulness thereof belongs. For Richter does not hide