CHAPTER VII.

THE EVERLASTING NO.

UNDER the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our Professor has now shrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nevertheless progressive, and growing: for how can the Son of Time,' in any case, stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in a state of crisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general solution into aimless Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation; wherefrom, the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself?

Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle, when he moults, is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old one upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual acts and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as, indeed, how could there be other? Have we not seen him disappointed, bemocked of Destiny, through long years? All that the young heart might desire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst instance, offered and then snatched away. Ever an excellent Passivity;' but of useful, reasonable Activity, essential to the former as Food to Hunger, nothing granted: till at length, in this wild Pilgrimage, he must forcibly seize for himself an Activity, though

useless, unreasonable. Alas! his cup of bitterness, which had been filling drop by drop, ever since that first ' ruddy morning' in the Hinterschlag Gymnasium, was at the very lip; and then with that poison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Blumine business, it runs over, and even hisses over in a deluge of foam.

He himself says once, with more justness than originality Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, ⚫ he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his 'is emphatically the Place of Hope.' What then was our Professor's possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado.

Alas, shut out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! For as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: Doubt had dark⚫ened into Unbelief,' says he; shade after shade goes 'grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.' To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, that, for man's well-being, Faith ' is properly the one thing needful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and, without it, Wordlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury:' to

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such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of every thing. Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship, and of false Love, all wounds in thy so genial heart would have healed again, had not its life-warmth been withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: Is there no 'God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go? Has the word Duty no mean'ing: is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and • Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made up of Desire · and Fear, of emanations from the Gallows and from 'Doctor Graham's Celestial-Bed? Happiness of an ap'proving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus, whom admiring men have since named Saint, feel that he was “the ́ chief of sinners ;" and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (wohlgemuth), spend much of his time in fiddling? 'Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder, that in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike ' itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,—I tell thee, Nay! To the unre

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generate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever the ⚫ bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is con'scious of Virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of 'suffering only, but of injustice. What then? Is the 'heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion ; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction ' others profit by? I know not only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much. But what, in these dull unima

'ginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to the dis· eases of the Liver! Not on Morality, but on Cookery let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our 'fryingpan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the 'Devil, and live at ease on the fat things which he has ' provided for his Elect!'

Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sybilcave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. To such length has the spirit of Inquiry carried him. But what boots it (was thuts)?' cries heit is but the common lot in this era.

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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

'allegiance to her. "Truth!" I cried, "though the "Heavens crush me for following her: no Falsehood!

' though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of 'Apostacy." In conduct it was the same. Had a

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"divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculous Handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me This shalt thou 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 Phi'losophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination 'they had brought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly present to me: living without God in the 'world, of God's light I was not utterly bereft; if m

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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.'

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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 done. Between vague wavering Ca'pability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a "difference! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness ' dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render 'articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are 'the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural linea'ments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept,