How shall I speak of the extraordinary emotions which were excited in my mind at a chance opening of the pages at the first chapter of the _Sartor_? The hurling satire of the opening paragraph--the torch of learning having so illuminated every cranny and dog-hole in the universe that the creation of the world had now become no more mysterious than the making of a dumpling, though concerning this last there were still some to whom the question as to how the apples were got in presented an insoluble problem--this seized me with an amazement of pleasure. I do not mean to say a presumptuous thing at all; but it is a simple fact that from this first beginning of acquaintance with Carlyle, he never once appeared to teach me anything in the way of thought. I know he did so; I know that he profoundly coloured the fountains of my mind for many years; that long and long after the experience I am recording, I thought Carlyle, and wrote Carlyle; and that neither the thinking nor the literary mode could ever have occurred to me without his influence; but in my first reading of his pages, he seemed to be telling me things which were deeply implanted in my soul already. The truth about the matter is, probably, that he dominated me so completely that I did not think at all of domination. But all I know is, that I seemed suddenly to have found an unexpected and hitherto unimagined self. I leapt in transport to encounter a majestic Me; and in this impulse I can honestly aver that there was no tinge of vanity. I should say, rather, that it sprang from the utter humility of the disciple who instantly, absolutely, and unquestionably accepted the master's word. Be these things as they may, the Carlylean gospel came to me, not as a revelation of another's mind, but as an unveiling of a something which seemed to have been for ever my own, though until that great hour I had not dreamed of its possession.
I do not propose to make any immediate flight into sentiment. The thing for which I am trying is a genuine recollection of the way in which the growth of this emotion was marked within myself. Things are very much otherwise to-day; but nearly three-score years ago there was a certain purposed austerity practised by the most dutiful and praiseworthy parents, which froze the natural budding affections of a child. Before I had arrived at the technical age of manhood, my father had become the dearest friend I had in the world, and the friendship lasted till his death; but as a child I feared him. He was by nature as kindly a man as ever lived; but he had been bred in the old rigid Calvinistic creed of Scotland, and though I knew very well, in later years, how his heart had rebelled against him, he was, throughout my childhood and early youth, the embodiment of justice, certainly, so far as he could see it, but always of an apparently unpitying severity. Any judgment of his character based on the system of discipline in which he devoutly believed would have been false in the extreme, for the infliction of pain was actually abhorrent to him. I remember how, on scores of occasions, when I put him to the ordeal of administering a hiding to myself, his face would grow pale, and his hand would tremble.