The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to
me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle,
though at a perceptible distance:--
"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,
know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!
"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision the whole members are
in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as
once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let there be
Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is it not
miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to
the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the
rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate
Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and
the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, above; instead
of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,
heaven-encompassed World.
"I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
World, or even Worldkin.
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