the spirit of Inquiry carried him. 'But what boots it was thut's)?' cries he: 'it is but the common lot in this era. Not having come to spiritual majority prior to the Siècle de Louis Quinze, and not being born purely a Loghead (Dummkopf), 'thou hadst no other outlook. The whole world is, like thee, 'sold to Unbelief; their old Temples of the Godhead, which for 'long have not been rainproof, crumble down; and men ask now: Where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him?'

Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our Diogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no era of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God, than even now when doubting God's existence. One circumstance I note,' says he: 'after all 'the nameless woe that Inquiry, which for me, what it is not always, was genuine Love of Truth, had wrought me, I never'theless still loved Truth, and would bate no jot of my alle'giance to her. "Truth!" I cried, "though the Heavens crush me for following her: no Falsehood! though a whole celestial 'Lubberland were the price of Apostasy." In conduct it was 'the same. Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or mira'culous Handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to 'me This thou shalt do, with what passionate readiness, as I ' often thought, would I have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire. Thus, in spite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies, with the sick oph'thalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the In'finite nature of Duty still dimly present to me: living without "God in the world, of God's light I was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was present, and 'His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.'

Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritual destitutions, what must the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured! The painfullest feeling,' writes he, 'is that of 'your own Feebleness (Unkraft); ever, as the English Milton 'says, to be weak is the true misery. And yet of your Strength 'there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have dɩ ne. Between vague waver'ing Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a dif'ference! A certain inarticulate Self-con. iousness dwells dimly

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́in us; which only our Works can render articulate and de⚫cisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly ' of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated ' into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work • at.

'But for me, so strangely unprosperous had I been, the net' result of my Workings amounted as yet simply to-Nothing. • How then could I believe in my Strength, when there was as ' yet no mirror to see it in? Ever did this agitating, yet, as I • now perceive, quite frivolous question, remain to me insoluble : • Hast thou a certain Faculty, a certain Worth, such even as 'the most have not; or art thou the completest Dullard of these ⚫ modern times? Alas, the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself; and how could I believe? Had not my first, last Faith ' in myself, when even to me the Heavens seemed laid open, and I dared to love, been all-too cruelly belied? The specu⚫lative Mystery of Life grew ever more mysterious to me: nei⚫ther in the practical Mystery had I made the slightest progress, 'but been everywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast ' out. A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, • I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was there, in 'the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips : why should I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called 'Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I ⚫ then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten 'that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In 'the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another's, ' that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle. • Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have • fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, with t Life, though only diabolic Life, were

more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, 'the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as 'believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, ' of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, ⚫ dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead in'difference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living ⚫ banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is 'no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?'

A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as the worst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a Teufelsdröckh threaten to fail? We conjecture that he has known sickness; and, in spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of the chronic sort. Hear this, for example: How 'beautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in practice; every window of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that 'no pure ray can enter; a whole Drugshop in your inwards; 'the fordone soul drowning slowly in quagmires of Disgust!'

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Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we not find in the following sentences, quite in our Professor's still vein, significance enough? From Suicide a certain ' aftershine (Nachschein) of Christianity withheld me: perhaps ' also a certain indolence of character; for, was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach? Often, however, was there a question present to me: Should some one now, at the turning ' of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, into the other 'World, or other No-world, by pistol-shot, how were it? On 'which ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged 'cities and other death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, ' which passed, falsely enough, for courage.'

'So had it lasted,' concludes the Wanderer, 'so had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The ⚫ heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest ' memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle's splendour), and thought that of this last Friend even I was 'not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die.

'Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of 'Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, 'could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: ' it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth ' beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were 'but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpi'tating, waited to be devoured.

Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in 'the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog

day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little • Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnez'zar's Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when, all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked 'myself: "What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, 'dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trein'bling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst 'that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or 'can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not 'suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes 'thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it !" And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my 'whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever 'from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fireeyed Defiance.

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'Thus had the EVERLASTING No (das ewige Nein) pealed • authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my 'ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native 'God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. 'Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may ' that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point ' of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: "Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine

'(the Devil's);" to which my whole Me now made answer : "/ am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee !"

'It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New'birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly there' upon began to be a Man.'

Autesan, 1822, te May, 1825

CHAPTER VIII.

CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE.

THOUGH, after this Baphometic Fire-baptism' of his, our Wanderer signifies that his Unrest was but increased; as, indeed, Indignation and Defiance,' especially against things in general, are not the most peaceable inmates; yet can the Psychologist surmise that it was no longer a quite hopeless Unrest; that henceforth it had at least a fixed centre to revolve round. For the fire-baptised soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feeling is its Baphometic Baptism the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battling, will doubtless by degrees be conquered and pacificated. Under another figure, we might say, if in that great moment, in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, the old inward Satanic School was not yet thrown out of doors, it received peremptory judicial notice to quit; whereby, for the rest, its howl-chantings, Ernulpluscursings, and rebellious gnashings of teeth, might, in the mean while, become only the more tumultuous, and difficult to keep

secret.

Accordingly, if we scrutinise these Pilgrimings well, there is perhaps discernible henceforth a certain incipient method in their madness. Not wholly as a Spectre does Teufelsdröckh now storm through the world; at worst as a spectre-fighting Man, nay who will one day be a Spectre-queller. If pilgriming restlessly to so many 'Saints' Wells,' and ever without quenching of his thirst, he nevertheless finds little secular wells, whereby from time to time some alleviation is ministered. In a word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to 'eat his own heart;' and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-ME for whole