Thomas Carlyle's connection to Goethe is often seen through the following lens: a struggling young Scot, newly married making a living by scraping on translations and literary reviews, reaches out across the sea to a living legend, Goethe and, much to his surprise, receives a reply to his letter. That letter would give way to a decade of full-blown literary correspondence. This can be seen as the first practical instantiation of Carlyle's emerging theory on heroes and hero-worship. As Gregory Maertz has pointed out there is a religious element to the cult of personality that Carlyle initiates around Goethe and that would flower in the Anglosphere in the latter nineteenth century. Carlyle's development of this cult of personality corresponds with Reinhart Koselleck's Sattelzeit thesis of the transition to modernity. The transformation of religion is seen in this relocation of sources of authority and the redirection of devotion, key elements of an emerging hero-worship within democratic culture.