of a few thousand pounds will be considered as any obstacle, by a reasonable government, to the completion of the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Thirdly nothing short of entire ignorance of facts could raise an objection on the ground of the risk of life. In the whole of the expeditions and their numerous winterings in the ice, not more than three lives were lost, and those appear to have been such as would have fallen anywhere; and it is a well-established fact, that the bodily health of both men and officers has been improved and their constitutions strengthened, by wintering on the ice. Captain James Ross, who, we believe, passed seven winters in the frozen regions, is one of the most active, vigorous, and portly men that can be seen; and Sir Edward Parry answers in person (and we have no doubt in other respects) to the 'vir liber' of Horace, totus teres atque rotundus.' But the degree of ignorance that prevails, even in the reading community of this country, respecting these northern voyages, is quite surprising. When intelligence arrived that two gentlemen of the Hudson's Bay Company had completed the survey of a portion of the North American coast, one heard in all societies, and read in a dozen newspapers, that the north-west passage had at last been discovered; and when Back was sent out to Repulse Bay to effect the remaining portion, we were told he was gone to the north pole. One is less surprised, therefore, at the simplicity of the gentleman, who, on viewing the panorama of Sir John Ross, said coolly to the showman, 'Pray, sir, be kind enough to show these ladies the north pole,' and received for answer, You see, sir, that there pole on the hill with a flag on it; that, sir, is the north pole;' which sent him away quite satisfied.

If the government, from want of information or from indifference, should be induced to abandon all further attempts to pursue a subject, which has engaged the attention of the first men of every age, from the time of Elizabeth to the present day, then indeed we may well despond. But no-after all the undaunted, persevering, and, we will add, successful efforts, that have been made and recorded, we can hardly persuade ourselves that this will be the case. We cannot believe-now the doors have been widely thrown open-that the triumph of first actually passing the threshold shall, after all that we have done to clear the way, be left to any foreign flag. Forbid it, we say, national honour! Forbid it, national pride! Should this be permitted, England may bow her head.

ART.

ART. V.-1. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. By Thomas Carlyle. 4 vols. 12mo. London, 1839.

2. The French Revolution, a History. 3 vols. 12mo. London, 1837.

3. Sartor Resartus. Ibid. 12mo. 1836.

4. Chartism. By Thomas Carlyle. London. Svo. 1839. THESE remarkable volumes contain many grave errors: they

exhibit vagueness, and misconception, and apparently total ignorance in points of the utmost importance. They profess to be on subjects of ethics, philosophy, and religion, and yet, notwithstanding a plausible phraseology scattered here and there, they make no profession of a definite Christianity; and if it were fair to put hints and general sentiments together, and to charge the writer with the conclusions to which they probably will bring his readers, we should be compelled to describe them as a new profession of Pantheism. Yet there is so much truth in them, and so inany evidences, not only of an inquiring and deep-thinking mind, but of a humble, trustful, and affectionate heart, that we have not the slightest inclination to speak of them otherwise than kindly. We are very willing to believe that what is false and bad belongs to the evil circumstances of the day-what is good and true to the author himself; and to hope that more light and knowledge will bring him right at last, since already he has advanced so far in defiance of the difficulties around him.

In one point of view, Mr. Carlyle's writings, and the partial popularity which they have obtained, are a striking symptom of the state of the times. No author of any school confesses more distinctly that for more than a century the English mind has been incapable of originating or appreciating any deep philosophy. Its whole vision, he avows, seems to have been obscured, and perverted to a singular obliquity. The only works professing a graver philosophy, which we can now put into the hands of young students, who wish to know what their immediate ancestors have thought on the weightiest questions respecting man, are those to which the really powerful intellects of Germany and France have pointed, the better with contempt, and the worse with triumph, as the source of most of the follies which subsequently inundated those countries. From these a man may learn that he is made of five senses, and little more; that he is to think for himself, without listening to others; that he is not responsible to man, and consequently not to God, for his opinions, nor, therefore, for his actions; that his whole intellectual power is merely a machine for grinding logic; that it is his right and duty to govern himself, and not to be governed by others; that societies are joint-stock companies for taking care

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of man's body, leaving his soul to take care of itself; that whatever he thinks and feels is right; that whatever he deems profitable is also good; that his mind may be anatomised and studied as a skeleton in a glass-case, and all its faculties and organs injected and laid out-and that with this, and this alone, we may thoroughly understand it; that it is every man's business to take care of himself; that it is our duty to see the whole of everything; that whatever we cannot see, and force into a syllogism, is false; that mystery is another word for falsehood; that religion is little more than priestcraft; that men can find, and did find it out, at the beginning, by the light of their own understanding; that if religion is to be maintained it should be excluded at least from the ordinary pursuits and speculations of life, and placed in quarantine, as if its very breath would infect the independence and value of truth; that prudent practice has no connexion with profound theory; and that in a world of railroads and steam-boats, printing-presses, and spinning-jennies, deep thinking is quite out of place.

In this country the faint beginning of better things may be traced first in the works of Coleridge and Wordsworth. The former, a vigorous, self-formed, irregular, but penetrative mind, incapable of acquiescing in the meagre fare set before it by the popular literature, was compelled to seek for something more substantial in the new world of German metaphysics. How largely he was indebted to these for the views, and even words, which he promulgated in England, we need not now inquire. But whatever he may have borrowed, he was a man of true native genius; and Coleridge has undoubtedly given considerable impulse to thought in this country, and dissipated the ennui which the more energetic minds felt in travelling over the smooth uninteresting Macadamised road of modern English literature, where every mile brought back the same prospect, and the end was constantly in view, and not a turn or a chasm, or a rut was permitted to disturb the dulness of its logical perspicuity and ease. He put before them statements which they could not understand; hinted at mysteries; indulged in a strange uncouth phraseology, which awakened attention, as a new language; and first taught young minds their own weakness, and then encouraged them to undertake exercises which would create strength. We are very far from thinking Coleridge a safe or sound writer; but he has done good: he opened one eye of the sleeping intellect of this country--and the whole body is now beginning to show signs of animation.

To Mr. Wordsworth the country owes a still greater debt of gratitude. Even he has only made a step to the restoration

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of better philosophy among us: but it is a great step, in a safer direction, and its influence will be felt far more extensively. It is singular to observe in how many great revolutions, which have altered the course of human opinions and affairs, the impulse and direction have been given, not by one but by two minds, cooperating together, one representing the higher power of the intellect, and the other more of feeling. Plato and Aristotle, Luther and Melancthon, Jerome and Augustine, Cranmer and Ridley, were yoke-fellows of this kind: so Wordsworth, the kind, gentle, affectionate Wordsworth, seems to have been almost paired with the acute, restless, deep-thinking Coleridge. And if God has a work to be done in this land, it is not strange that he should employ instruments to address both the head and the heart. is in this latter work that Wordsworth has been most efficient. We can scarcely overrate the blessing to this country of recovering a school of poetry quiet, pure, and sober, and yet not superficial-which, even if it be at times, as it certainly is, artificial and affected, is affected in imitation of the better and simpler parts of nature-to supersede the exaggerated phantasmagoria of one school, and the effeminate sensualities of another. Mr. Wordsworth, in the face of ridicule, has attempted this, and, after a long and patient endurance of many slights, he has lived to see his own success.*

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One great, perhaps the greatest, truth of philosophy, and the best foundation for all philosophy, has been brought home and familiarised to ordinary readers by Wordsworth's poetry; and this truth gives the chief value to Mr. Carlyle's speculations: it is the value of little things. Perhaps, after all, the whole of human philosophy is nothing more than construing signs, translating one language into another, reading individual facts in general principles, and general principles in individual facts. As philosophy, in the more restricted sense of the word, is the translation of matter into spirit, the tracing of the infinite and invisible, and universal, and spiritual, in the little, palpable, partial hints of the material world; so art in its widest extent,

* About a year since the University of Oxford conferred on him an honorary degree. Persons who were present have asserted, that no enthusiasm in the same assembly, except that with which they received their own illustrious Chancellor, equalled the applause with which the good old man,—the poet,' as he was then entitled by them, ' of the poor,--was greeted by a body mostly of young men, who a few years back would have been sighing and looking desperate over the sorrows of Lara or Manfred, and laughing with scorn at Peter Bell and Betty Foy-as if Peter Bell and Betty Foy were the whole of Wordsworth; or a man could not be a poet whose hero was not guilty of incest or murder, a hater and hated of mankind. To have produced such a change, and led insensibly to the formation of an entire new school in poetry-a poetry of deep thought, as well as pure and warm feeling is a recollection which he may well cherish in the decline of his life as an inexhaustible comfort.

including

including the whole range of man's creative powers, may be only the same process reversed: it may be the embodying of the same great truths, which philosophy evolves from material forms, in material forms again; the rendering them visible and sensible to common eyes, not capable of discerning or retaining them in their disembodied abstract existence. If this be so, we may understand how philosophy is inseparably connected with art, and especially with poetry; and how much it owes to a poet, who has taught men to look at nature in its minutest forms, in its leaves and insects, and petty movements, and humblest shadows-even in its most degraded creatures-as a deep and awful mystery, before which there is no place for arrogance or conceit; where he who sees nothing but the exterior is little better than an idiot, and he who pierces most deeply, sees the darkest depths beyond. Once make the human being feel that there is more in things around him than he can understand or penetrate, and he will acknowledge a mystery. With mystery will come the sense of his own weakness, humility, and self-distrust, and the still better consciousness of the presence of a greater power. Then follows necessarily faith-for in the midst of doubt and darkness man cannot live without faith. If he has no ground for it, as the Christian has, he will invent and imagine a ground for it, as Mr. Carlyle does; he will persist in cherishing it, though he can give no reason for it: and thus, though far from the truth, he has yet escaped from the regions farthest opposed to it, from scepticism, cold-heartedness, self-sufficiency-the logical restless cavilling of an intellect which sees nothing beyond itself—and the final dreariness of despair, which comes on as night draws round us, when the understanding can no longer work, and the heart can no more be deluded by its own vain dreams, but must awake and face the frightful realities of a world without a God, because without a creed; and without a creed, because without a Church.

This stirring of English philosophy in two poets has been followed by still more decisive and practical movements in other quarters. A new school of thought and feeling is undoubtedly forming itself: and what is more satisfactory, it does not appear to be gathering itself round any one individual as a nucleus; but one and the same spirit seems to be breaking forth and struggling into life from the most independent sources.

Even in France, where, if in any country, the human heart and mind would seem wholly and irrecoverably dead, or so poisoned by vices of all kinds, that no hope could be cherished of anything pure or elevated emanating from it, there is a school now forming, and acting insensibly on public opinion, which is very little known, but to which we cannot look without much interest,

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