Carlyle on Life and Work

My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away. Give it, I advise thee—thou dost not expect to sell thy Life in an adequate manner? What price, for example, would content thee? The just price of thy LIFE to thee—why, God’s entire Creation to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold: that is the price which would content thee; that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all; and for it thou wouldst have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal—or rather thou art a poor infinite mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, seemest so unreasonable! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price be Nothing: thou hast then, in a certain sense, got All for it! The heroic man—and is not every man, God be thanked, a potential hero?—has to do so, in all times and circumstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an age when so much was unmelodious: ‘By Heaven, they shall either be invaluable or of no value—I do not need your guineas for them!’ It is an element which should, and must, enter deeply into all settlements of wages here below. They never will be ’satisfactoy’ otherwise; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they never can! Money for my little piece of work ‘to the extent that will allow me to keep working’; yes, this—unless you mean that I shall go my ways before the work is all taken out of me: but as to ‘wages’!—!—