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Critical and Miscellaneous Essays in Five Volumes
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays in Five Volumes Author:THOMAS CARLYLE General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: MIRABEAU1 [1837] A Proverb says, ' The house that is a-building looks not as the house that is built.' Environed with rubbish and mortar- heaps, with scaffold-poles, hodmen, dust-clouds, some rudiments only of the thing that is to be, can, to the most observant, disclose themselves through the mean tumult of the thing that hitherto is. How true is this same with regard to all works and facts whatsoever in our world; emphatically true in regard to the highest fact and work which our world witnesses, -- the Life of what we call an Original Man. Such a man is one not made altogether by the common pattern; one whose phases and goings-forth cannot be prophesied of, even approximately ; though, indeed, by their very newness and strangeness they most of all provoke prophecy. A man of this kind, while he lives on earth, is ' unfolding himself out of nothing into something,' surely under very complex conditions: he is drawing continually towards him, in continual succession and variation, the materials of his structure, nay, his very plan of it, from the whole realm of Accident, you may say, and from the whole realm of Freewill: he is building his life together in this manner; a guess and a problem as yet, not to others only but to himself. Hence such criticism by the bystanders; loud no-knowledge, loud mis-knowledge ! It is like the opening of the Fisherman's Casket in the Arabian Tale, this beginning and growing-up of a life: vague smoke wavering hither and thither; some features of a Genie looming through; of the ultimate shape of which no fisherman or man can judge. And yet, as we say, men do judge, and p...« less