*

:

whole systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, almost like that of Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mighty maze, yet as faith whispers, not without a plan. Nay we complained above, that a certain ignoble complexity, what we must call mere confusion, was also discernible. Often, also, we have to exclaim Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience. At present it is only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at wide enough intervals from the original Volume, and carefully collated, that we can hope to impart some outline or foreshadow of this Doctrine. Readers of any intelligence are once more invited to favour us with their most concentrated attention: let these, after intense consideration, and not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon there is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands, perhaps whole undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvass to sail thither?As exordium to the whole, stand here the following long citation:

With men of a speculative turn,' writes Teufelsdröckh, 'there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder 'and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am 'I; the thing that can say "I" (das Wesen das sich 【cí nennt)? The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into the distance; and through the paper-hangings, and stone-walls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence sits surrounded, the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it as one mysterious Presence with another.

'Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance ;—some embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal 'Mind? Cogito, ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us 'but a little way. Sure enough I am; and lately was not: but 'Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies around, written ' in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and

6

ех

Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressi'bly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. 'What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and " Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cunningly 'built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. The whole is greater than the part': how exceedingly true! Nature abhors a vacuum: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, Nothing can act but where it is: with all my heart; only WHERE 'is it? Be not the slave of Words: is not the Distant, the Dead, ' while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it, Here, in the 'genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? But that same 'WHERE, with its brother, WHEN, are from the first the master'colours of our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvass (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are

เ

'painted. Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught cer'tain of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, SO 'mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but super'ficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not all nations conceived their God 'as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in a universal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there is no Space and no Time: WE are we know not what ; -light-sparkles floating in the æther of Deity!

'So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an airimage, our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousand'fold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own in'ward Force, the "phantasy of our Dream;" or what the EarthSpirit in Faust names it, the living visible Garment of God:

"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion !
Birth and Death,

An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving

The fire of the Living:

'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,

And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."

'Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder'speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty units of us that 'have learned the meaning thereof?

'It was in some such mood, when wearied and foredone with 'these high speculations, that I first came upon the question of 'Clothes. Strange enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of 'there being Tailors and Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own 'whole fell: strip him of the girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and the noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner: nay his own bootmaker, 'jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the valleys, 'with a perennial rainproof court suit on his body; wherein 'warmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the

Nature
Mau- extern

THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES.

'graces also have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay
'variety of colour, featly appended, and ever in the right place,
'are not wanting. While I-good Heaven!—have thatched my-
'self over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables,
'the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of
'furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, over-
'heaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of
'Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly!
'Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this
'despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some
'film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed off
'into the Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has
'been brushed thither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rag-

'grinder, get new material to grind down. O subter-brutish! Curi,

'vile! most vile! For have not I too a compact all-enclosing 'Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass of tailors' and 'cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous 'little Figure, automatic, nay alive?

Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and 'Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. 'But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; 'much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. 'Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver ; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose: thus let 'but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World hap'pen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or 'noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your 'ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he gold'mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible; that he is naked, with'out vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew and button them.

'For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and how, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailor'ises and demoralises us, fill me with a certain horror at myself 'and mankind; almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which, 'during the wet season, you see grazing deliberately with jackets

'and petticoats (of striped sacking), in the meadows of Gouda 'Nevertheless there is something great in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and sees 'indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, "a forked strad'dling animal with bandy legs;" yet also a Spirit, and unutter'able Mystery of Mysteries.'

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