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why murmur under it; is there not a better coming, nay come? As in longdrawn Systole and longdrawn Diastole, must the period of Faith alternate with the period of Denial; must the vernal growth, the summer luxuriance of all Opinions, Spiritual 'Representations and Creations, be followed by, and again follow, 'the autumnal decay, the winter dissolution. For man lives in Time, has his whole earthly being, endeavour, and destiny shaped for him by Time: only in the transitory Time-Symbol 'is the ever-motionless Eternity we stand on made manifest. 'And yet, in such winter seasons of Denial, it is for the nobler'minded perhaps a comparative misery to have been born, and to 'be awake, and work; and for the duller a felicity, if like hiber'nating animals, safe-lodged in some Salamanca University, or 'Sybaris City, or other superstitious or voluptuous Castle of Indolence, they can slumber through, in stupid dreams, and only 'awaken when the loud-roaring hailstorms have all done their 'work, and to our prayers and martyrdoms the new Spring has 'been vouchsafed.'

That in the environment, here mysteriously enough shadowed forth, Teufelsdröckh must have felt ill at ease, cannot be doubtful. 'The hungry young,' he says, 'looked up to their spiritual 'Nurses; and, for food, were bidden eat the east wind. What vain jargon of controversial Metaphysic, Etymology, and me'chanical Manipulation falsely named Science, was current there, 'I indeed learned, better perhaps than the most. Among eleven 'hundred Christian youths, there will not be wanting some eleven eager to learn. By collision with such, a certain warmth, a cer'tain polish was communicated; by instinct and happy accident, "I took less to rioting (renommiren), than to thinking and read ́ ́ing, which latter also I was free to do. Nay from the chaos of that Library, I succeeded in fishing up more books perhaps than had been known to the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a Literary Life was hereby laid: I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on * almost all subjects, and sciences; farther, as man is ever the 'prime object to man, already it was my favourite employment to 'read character in speculation, and from the Writing to construe 'the Writer. A certain groundplan of Human Nature and Life

began to fashion itself in me; wondrous enough, now when I 'look back on it; for my whole Universe, physical and spiritual, เ was as yet a Machine However, such a conscious, recognized 'groundplan, the truest I had, was beginning to be there, and by 'additional experiments, might be corrected and indefinitely 'extended.'

Thus from poverty does the strong educe nobler wealth; thus in the destitution of the wild desert, does our young Ishmael acquire for himself the highest of all possessions, that of Self-help. Nevertheless a desert this was, waste, and howling with savage monsters. Teufelsdröckh gives us long details of his 'fever-paroxysms of Doubt;' his Inquiries concerning Miracles, and the Evidences of religious Faith; and how 'in the silent night'watches, still darker in his heart than over sky and earth, he 'has cast himself before the All-seeing, and with audible prayers, 'cried vehemently for Light, for deliverance from Death and the 'Grave. Not till after long years, and unspeakable agonies, did 'the believing heart surrender; sink into spell-bound sleep, 'under the nightmare, Unbelief; and, in this hag-ridden dream, mistake God's fair living world for a pallid, vacant Hades and 'extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain,' continues he, 'it is appointed us to pass; first must the dead 'Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into 'dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this its charnel'house, is to arise on us, newborn of Heaven, and with new heal'ing under its wings.'

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To which Purgatory pains, seemingly severe enough, if we add a liberal measure of Earthly distresses, want of practical guidance, want of sympathy, want of money, want of hope; and all this in the fervid season of youth, so exaggerated in imagining, so boundless in desires, yet here so poor in means,—do we not see a strong incipient spirit oppressed and overloaded from without and from within; the fire of genius struggling up among fuelwood of the greenest, and as yet with more of bitter vapour than of clear flame.

From various fragments of Letters and other documentary scraps, it is to be inferred that Teufelsdröckh, isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not altogether escaped notice: certain

*

established men are aware of his existence; and, if stretching out no helpful hand, have at least their eyes upon him. He appears, though in dreary enough humour, to be addressing himself to the Profession of Law;—whereof, indeed, the world has since seen him a public graduate. But omitting these broken, unsatisfactory thrums of Economical relation, let us present rather the following small thread of Moral relation; and therewith, the reader for himself weaving it in at the right place, conclude our dim arras picture of these University years.

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'Here also it was that I formed acquaintance with Herr Tow'good, or, as it is perhaps better written, Herr Toughgut; a young person of quality (von Adel), from the interior parts of England. He stood connected, by blood and hospitality, with 'the Counts von Zähdarm, in this quarter of Germany; to which 'noble Family I likewise was, by his means, with all friendliness, brought near. Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably ill-culti'vated; with considerable humour of character: and, bating his 'total ignorance, for he knew nothing except Boxing and a little 'Grammar, shewed less of that aristocratic impassivity, and silent -'fury, than for most part belongs to Travellers of his nation. 'To him I owe my first practical knowledge of the English and 'their ways; perhaps also something of the partiality with which I have ever since regarded that singular people. Towgood was X'not without an eye, could he have come at any light. Invited 'doubtless by the presence of the Zähdarm Family, he had tra'velled hither, in the almost frantic hope of perfecting his studies; 'he, whose studies had as yet been those of infancy, hither to a University where so much as the notion of perfection, not to say 'the effort after it, no longer existed! Often we would condole over the hard destiny of the Young in this era: how, after all our toil, we were to be turned out into the world, with beards on our chins indeed, but with few other attributes of manhood; no existing thing that we were trained to Act on, nothing that we 'could so much as Believe. "How has our head on the outside a polished Hat," would Towgood exclaim, "and in the inside Vacancy, or a froth of Vocables and Attorney Logic! At a 'small cost men are educated to make leather into shoes; but at 'a great cost, what am I educated to make? By Heaven, Bro

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'ther! what I have already eaten and worn, as I came thus far, 'would endow a considerable Hospital of Incurables.”—“ Man, ' indeed,” I would answer, “has a Digestive Faculty, which must 'be kept working, were it even partly by stealth. But as for our 'Miseducation, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet ours, in trampling on thistles because they have yielded us no 'figs. Frisch zu Bruder! Here are Books, and we have brains 'to read them; here is a whole Earth and a whole Heaven, and 'we have eyes to look on them: Frisch zu!"

'Often also our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even 'fire. We looked out on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where 'all at once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quar'tered: motley, not unterrific was the aspect; but we looked on 'it like brave youths. For myself, these were perhaps my most 'genial hours. Towards this young warmhearted, strongheaded ' and wrongheaded Herr Towgood, I was even near experiencing 'the now obsolete sentiment of Friendship. Yes, foolish Heathen that I was, I felt that, under certain conditions, I could have loved this man, and taken him to my bosom, and been his bro'ther once and always. By degrees, however, I understood the new time, and its wants. If man's Soul is indeed, as in the Fin'nish Language, and Utilitarian Philosophy, a kind of Stomach, 'what else is the true meaning of Spiritual Union but an Eating 'together? Thus we, instead of Friends, are Dinner-guests; and 'here as elsewhere have cast away chimeras.'

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So ends, abruptly as is usual, and enigmatically, this little incipient romance. What henceforth becomes of the brave Herr Towgood, or Toughgut? He has dived under, in the Autobiographical Chaos, and swims we see not where. Does any reader in the interior parts of England' know of such a man?

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CHAPTER IV.

GETTING UNDER WAY.

THUS nevertheless,' writes our Autobiographer, apparently as quitting College, was there realised Somewhat; namely, I, 'Diogenes Teufelsdröckh: a visible Temporary Figure (Zeitbild), 'occupying some cubic feet of Space, and containing within it 'Forces both physical and spiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts; 'the whole wondrous furniture, in more or less perfection, belong'ing to that mystery, a Man. Capabilities there were in me to 'give battle, in some small degree, against the great Empire of 'Darkness: does not the very Ditcher and Delver, with his spade, extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little Order, where he found the opposite? Nay your very Daymoth 'has capabilities in this kind; and ever organises something (into 'its own Body, if no otherwise), which was before Inorganic; and 'of mute dead air makes living music, though only of the faint'est, by humming.

'How much more, one whose capabilities are spiritual; who 'has learned, or begun learning, the grand thaumaturgic art of 'Thought! Thaumaturgic I name it; for hitherto all Miracles 'have been wrought thereby, and henceforth innumerable will be 'wrought; whereof we, even in these days, witness some. Of 'the Poet's and Prophet's inspired Message, and how it makes ' and unmakes whole worlds, I shall forbear mention; but cannot 'the dullest hear Steam-engines clanking around him? Has he 'not seen the Scottish Brassmith's IDEA (and this but a mechani'cal one) travelling on fire-wings round the Cape, and across two Oceans; and stronger than any other Enchanter's Familiar, on 'all hands unweariedly fetching and carrying: at home, not only 'weaving Cloth; but rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of Society; and, for Feudalism and Preservation of the