Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Unnoticed birth of national genius—Happy season of childhood—Student life—Struggling aspirations—Ideal Romance—Stress-and-Storm Period—Passionate despair—Stern self-control—Self-renunciation— Spiritual majority. Book II. Chap. I. Genesis.—If any intelligent student of Carlyle will recall, or re-read, the opening portion of the chapter on ' New Eras' in ' Chartism,' —showing how the successive generations of an appointed race hang together like an individual existence, or, to change the figure, how they flow continuously onward, wave after wave, like a stream of destiny, from the smallest beginnings to world-wide results,—he will easily realise Carlyle's conception as to the personality of Teufelsdrockh. Teufelsdr5ckh stands for the transcendental element in the German literary character ; to Carlyle an altogether new revelation of the possibilities of human life, and a prophecy of wide changes and developments in human thoughts, and in the relations of men to each other. The question is not at present, whether the reader agrees with Carlyle in his extraordinary estimate of the teachings of Richter, Goethe, and the rest of them. In all probability he entirely disagrees. Be that as it may. All I now ask of him is to try and realise the fact that Carlyle himself most strenuously believed it: believed it with a depth of conviction which swallowed up every intellectual misgiving, and gradually made an altogether ' new man' of him. Upon him, in his darkness, the new revelation of thought and purpose shone like the morning sun upon the mountain-tops; and, whatever we owe to Carlyle, we owe, primarily, through him, to Germany. The reader who cannot take this fact with him, will never realise the meaning and burden of ' Sartor Resartus.' The beginnings of German lit...