'hated, for my so-called Hardness (Härte), my Indif'ferentism towards men; and the seemingly ironic tone ‘I had adopted, as my favourite dialect in conversation. Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm was but as a buckram case, wherein I had striven to envelope myself; that so my own poor Person might live safe there; and in 'all friendliness, being no longer exasperated by wounds. 'Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of 'the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it. But how many individuals did I, in those days, provoke into some degree of hostility there'by! An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambuscading ways, more especially an ironic young man, from 'whom it is least expected, may be viewed as a pest to 'society. Have we not seen persons of weight and name, coming forward, with gentlest indifference, to tread such a one out of sight, as an insignificancy and worm, start ceiling-high (balkenhoch), and thence fall shattered and supine, to be borne home on shutters, not without 'indignation, when he proved electric and a torpedo!'

.

Alas, how can a man with this devilishness of temper make way for himself in Life; where the first problem, as Teufelsdröckh too admits, is 'to unite yourself with some one, and with somewhat (sich anzuschliessen)?' Division, not union, is written on most part of his procedure. Let us add too that, in no great length of time, the only important connexion he had ever succeeded in forming, his connexion with the Zähdarm Family, seems to have been paralysed, for all practical uses, by the death of the • not uncholeric' old Count. This fact stands recorded, quite incidentally, in a certain Discourse on Epitaphs, huddled into the present Bag, among so much else; of

which Essay the learning and curious penetration are more to be approved of than the spirit. His grand principle is, that lapidary inscriptions, of what sort soever, should be Historical rather than Lyrical. By request of that 'worthy Nobleman's survivors,' says he, I undertook C to compose his Epitaph; and not unmindful of my own rules, produced the following; which, however, 'for an alleged defect of Latinity, a defect never yet fully visible to myself, still remains unengraven ;'wherein, we may predict, there is more than the Latinity that will surprise an English reader :

6

HIC JACET

PHILIPPUS ZAEHDARM, COGNOMINE MAGNUS, ZAEHDARMI COMES,

EX IMPERII CONCILIO,

VELLERIS AUREI, PERISCELIDIS, NECNON VULTURIS NIGRI

EQUES.

QUI DUM SUB LUNA AGEBAT,

QUINQUIES MILLE PERDRICES

PLUMBO CONFECIT:

VARII CIBI

CENTUMPONDIA MILLIES CENTENA MILLIA,

PER SE, PERQUE SERVOS QUADRUPEDES BIPEDESVE,
HAUD SINE TUMULTU DEVOLVENS,

IN STERCUS

PALAM CONVERTIT.

NUNC A LABORE REQUIESCENTEM

OPERA SEQUUNTUR.

SI MONUMENTUM QUÆRIS

FIMETUM ADSPICE.

PRIMUM IN ORBE DEJECIT [sub dato]; POSTREMUM [sub dato].

CHAPTER V.

ROMANCE.

For long years,' writes Teufelsdrückh, had the poor 'Hebrew, in this Egypt of an Auscultatorship, painfully toiled, baking bricks without stubble, before ever the question once struck him with entire force: For what? -Beym Himmel! For Food and Warmth! And " are Food and Warmth nowhere else, in the whole wide Universe, discoverable?-Come of it what might, 'I resolved to try.'

Thus then are we to see him in a new independent capacity, though perhaps far from an improved one. Teufelsdröckh is now a man without Profession. Quitting the common Fleet of herring-busses and whalers, where indeed his leeward, laggard condition was painful enough, he desperately steers off, on a course of his own, by sextant and compass of his own. Unhappy Teufelsdröckh! Though neither Fleet, nor Traffic, nor Commodores pleased thee, still was it not a Fleet, sailing in prescribed track, for fixed objects; above all, in combination, wherein, by mutual guidance, by all manner of loans and borrowings, each could manifoldly aid the other? How wilt thou sail in unknown seas; and for thyself find that shorter, Northwest Passage to thy fair Spice-country of a Nowhere?—A solitary rover, on such a voyage, with such nautical tactics, will meet with

adventures. Nay, as we forthwith discover, a certain Calypso-Island detains him at the very outset; and as it were falsifies and oversets his whole reckoning.

'If in youth,' writes he once, the Universe is ma'jestically unveiling, and everywhere Heaven revealing ' itself on Earth, nowhere to the Young Man does this ' Heaven on Earth so immediately reveal itself as in the Young Maiden. Strangely enough, in this strange 'life of ours, it has been so appointed. On the whole, as I have often said, a Person (Personlichkeit) is ever holy to us; a certain orthodox Anthropomorphism connects my Me with all Thees in bonds of Love: but ' it is in this approximation of the Like and Unlike, that 'such heavenly attraction, as between Negative and Positive, first burns out into a flame. Is the pitifullest 'mortal Person, think you, indifferent to us? Is it not ' rather our heartfelt wish to be made one with him; to 'unite him to us, by gratitude, by admiration, even by 'fear; or failing all these, unite ourselves to him? But 'how much more, in this case of the Like-Unlike ! 'Here is conceded us the higher mystic possibility of 'such a union, the highest in our Earth; thus, in the conducting medium of Fantasy, flames forth that firedevelopment of the universal Spiritual Electricity, 'which, as unfolded between man and woman, we first emphatically denominate Love.

'In every well-conditioned stripling, as I conjecture, 'there already blooms a certain prospective Paradise, 'cheered by some fairest Eve; nor in the stately vistas, ' and flowerage and foliage of that Garden is a Tree of 'Knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof, 'wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier if

· Cherubim and a Flaming Sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant him, the imaginative stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy season ' of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable ' celestial barrier; and the sacred air-cities of Hope have 'not shrunk into the mean clay-hamlets of Reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free!

'As for our young Forlorn,' continues Teufelsdröckh, evidently meaning himself, in his secluded way of life, and with his glowing Fantasy, the more fiery that it burnt under cover, as in a reverberating furnace, his feeling towards the Queens of this Earth was, and ' indeed is, altogether unspeakable. A visible Divinity 'dwelt in them; to our young Friend all women were 'holy, were heavenly. As yet he but saw them flitting past, in their many-coloured angel-plumage; or hover'ing mute and inaccessible on the outskirts of Esthetic 'Tea: all of air they were, all Soul and Form; so lovely, 'like mysterious priestesses, in whose hand was the in'visible Jacob's-ladder, whereby man might mount into very Heaven. That he, our poor Friend, should ever 'win for himself one of these Gracefuls (Holden)— 'Ach Gott! how could he hope it; should he not have 'died under it? There was a certain delirious vertigo ' in the thought.

'Thus was the young man, if all sceptical of Demons and Angels such as the vulgar had once believed in, ' nevertheless not unvisited by hosts of true Sky-born, ' who visibly and audibly hovered round him whereso he went; and they had that religious worship in his thought, though as yet it was by their mere earthly and trivial name that he named them. But now,

if