Last words of Thomas Carlyle - Warburg Institute

—214 LETTEES WBITTEN BY THOMAS CAELYLE TOexcept thro' carriage windows, is very sad work.And you are still a j)risoner in Berlin, or nearly so ;yet, thank heaven, not an idle one, not a discontentedone : this too is something to be thankful for.We have to take the Light and the Dark as theyalternate for us here below ; and try to make the rightuse of both. I say often of myself that if I hadsuffered no ill health, I should have known nothing.The stars shine out, as Friedland's did, when it isgrown rightly dark round us !Yet I hope to hear, asthe summer advances, that you emerge again, andsee good under the sun. Nay, so long as you cancontinue writing, with whatever pain it be, how manysons of Adam are there, who ought to pity you ; whoare not rather called to envy you ? I know not if Iever reported with what pleasure I read that littleDelineation of the Prussian Field-Marshal Schwerin.'One has pleasure in it because it ts a ' Delineation,'which so many books only pretend to be : one sees acertain section of Human Life actually painted, renderedcredible and conceivable to one. That lastBattle is clear to me as if I had fought in it : thereis a kind of gloomy dumb tragicstrength in the Phenomenon,as in some old Norse-Mythics, forme,—asif I looked into the old Death-Kingdoms, whereonLiving Prussia, with what it can say and do, reposesand grows ! Those long ranks of speechless Men'Leben des Feldmarschall Grafen von Schwerin, von Vamhagen]was published 1841.