power of expression with the prophet's delusion of divine inspiration. Not that Carlyle should therefore be seen as a poet. To interpret his writings as "literature" ignores his Puritan reservations about art and literature, not to mention his explicit statement that "for us in these days Prophecy (well understood) not Poetry is the thing wanted; how can we sing and paint when we do not yet believe and see?" But Carlyle's works can be appropriately described as "prophetic"—rather than "poetic"—only if this term refers quite directly and literally to a tradition of religious thought that began with the Old Testament prophets, rose to the surface again in the Reformation, and came down to Carlyle by way of his Calvinist forebears. James Anthony Froude's oft-quoted remark that Carlyle remained a Puritan without the Puritan theology fails to capture the full extent of his indebtedness to the tradition of Judeo-Christian prophecy. Carlyle retained much of the old theology, even though he expressed it in a new and highly idiosyncratic idiom. The power and majesty of the sovereign creator of life; the inescapability of evil in the form of natural limits on human freedom; the sinfulness of man's rebellion against those limits; the moral value of work, which at once signifies man's submission to necessity and enables him to transcend it—these insights represented the heart of Calvinist theology, along with its analysis of religious experience, the psychology of despair and conversion; and they represented the heart of Carlyle's work as well, or at least of the work that continues to matter.

To present Carlyle in this way admittedly ignores much of his output and skips too lightly over his unpalatable opinions—his increasingly shrill and indiscriminate condemnation of democracy, his defense of slavery as a lesser evil than wage labor, his support of the South in the American Civil War, and the authoritarian implications that lurked in his doctrine of hero worship and became quite explicit in his later works. But a recital of Carlyle's political errors serves no purpose, as Raymond Williams once

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