One book especially, given to me by a sergeant of ours, had a strong influence on me. This was Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. I read that over and over and then bought a cheap copy of Sartor Resartus. I remember one evening, after reading the famous meditation on the sleeping city, I threw the book across the room. I felt I should never be able to write like that.

As you introduced Schiller to your countrymen, so you have placed before the Germans our great Prussian King in his full figure; like a living statue. What you said long years ago of the "Hero as Man of Letters"—that he is under the noble obligation to be true,—has been fulfilled in yourself; but, more fortunate than those of whom you then spoke, you may rejoice in what you have accomplished, and continue your work in full vigour, which may God long preserve to you. Accept with my cordial congratulations the assurance of my sincere respect.

There was the puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward Irving, then just dead: ‘Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines,—and it took her twelve years!’

These are damned times—everything is against one—the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle.

After fifty years we are still dependent on him for Cromwell, and in Past and Present he gave what was the most remarkable piece of historical thinking in the language. But the mystery of investigation had not been revealed to him when he began his most famous book [The French Revolution] ... [T]he vivid gleam, the mixture of the sublime with the grotesque, make other opponents forget the impatient verdicts and the poverty of settled fact in the volumes that delivered our fathers from thraldom to Burke. They remain one of those disappointing storm-clouds that give out more thunder than lightning.

There is no English historian who has a right to be judged by a higher or severer test, for no one has spoken more deeply and truly on the character and dignity of history... He showed an intelligence of things which no other English historian has understood. He dwelt upon the invisible impersonal forces that act in history, and appreciated, often with rare sagacity, the true significance and sequence of events. But he was unable to follow the course he had pointed out, and failed even to maintain himself on the high ground he had reached. He could not distinguish in history what was unknown to him in religion: thus he fell to the exclusive contemplation of certain typical individuals, whose greatness appeared to supply what he wanted, an object of worship, and personified invisible elements in visible men. And now the belongings of his hero possess so great an importance that they distract his attention from him; he invests with an absurd dignity not only his relations, but their goods and chattels, and allows merely material things to eclipse the human interest of his subject. It is a history made up of eccentricities. This is the way that Mr. Dickens writes novels; for whom the spectacles of an elderly gentleman, a pair of mulberry coloured hose, or a wandering American pig, have greater attractions than any psychological problem.

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?

Lord Bacon could as easily have created this planet as he could have written Hamlet.