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. HIS STYLE. The writings of Carlyle we will call Babylonia bricks —the ideas and the words are huge and shapeless, and cyclopean ; indeed, we may call his books the cyclo- pean order of literary architecture. What else could we do but this ? Genuine productions these of this wild age—this age in which the feats of jpKncc rival the grand antediluvian ages of nature, and in which man, by following nature and imitating nature, has subdued nature. A literature in ancient Babylon was impossible; so of ancient Egypt, where they published their periodical literature on mummy papyri, and on sarcophagi and Rosetta stones. We never, until the age in which we live, emulated the ancient vagaries and grotesque magnificences of the world's patriarchal times. True, in those old days the Temple sprang up on the lofty rock, and the mighty bull struggled at Nineveh from the stone. But if any man contemplates this age keenly and intently, with the certainty that while the human mind has made the age, the age not less certainly acts on the mind, what must be his impressions ? It has been said die nation, the world,4O Anti-Macassar v. Bearskin. is shod with iron. Have not human achievements touched the confines of miracle—miracles beheld nowhere so amazingly as in the truly wonderful agglomerations of a great city? Carlyle's writings are to us the literature of an age of great cities—an age of great cities where, in addition to the stupendous shapes of science, Titanic speculations flit to and fro like vast ghosts, worthy of the vast regions they populate and overcrowd. Or, as in Etruria, you find the cyclopean temple and tomb, while forms of wonderful life, three thousand years old, startle you by the pathos and tenderness of nature in the marvellously preserved pictures of those...