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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle
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Title: Past and Present
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Release Date: September 27, 2004 [EBook #13534]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
- START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAST AND PRESENT ***
Produced by Jake Jaqua
PAST AND PRESENT
By Thomas Carlyle
Appreciation by Ralph Waldo Emerson
First published 1843
THOMAS CARLYLE, born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, the son of a
stonemason. Educated at Edinburgh University. Schoolmaster for a short time, but decided on a literary career, visiting Paris and London. Retired in 1828 to Dumfriesshire to write. In 1834 moved to Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and died there in 1881.
INTRODUCTION
Being an appreciation from "The Dial" (July 1843)
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here is Carlyle's new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his poem on France, entitled the _History of the French Revolution._ In its first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it. It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master's mind, and, with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his
brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the dread