Carlyle was one who stood constantly in the presence of those ‘Eternal verities’ of which he speaks… . The spirit of the prophet was in him… . He was the greatest of the Britons of his time—and after the British fashion of not coming near perfection: Titanic, not Olympian: a heaver of rocks, not a shaper. But if he did no perfect work, he had lightning’s power to strike out marvelous pictures and reach to the inmost of men with a phrase.
Thomas Carlyle