But it is difficult to discern in all this what his endless and
plangent melancholy was concerned with. He had a very singular
physical frame, immensely tough and wiry, with an imagination which
emphasized and particularised every slight touch of bodily
disorder. When he was at work, he toiled like a demon day after
day, entirely and vehemently absorbed. When he was not at work he
suffered from dreary reaction. He fought out in early days a severe
moral combat, and found his way to a belief in God which was very
different from his former Calvinism. Carlyle can by no stretch of
the word be called a Christian, but he was one of the most
thoroughgoing Deists that ever lived. The terror that beset him in
that first great conflict was a ghastly fear of his own
insignificance, and a horrible suspicion that the world was made on
fortuitous and indifferent lines. His dread was that of being
worsted, in spite of all his eager sensibility and immense desire
to do a noble work, of being crushed, silenced, thrown ruthlessly
on the dust-heap of the world.
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