'below. What argument will avail? On the thick Hyperberean, cherubic reasoning, seraphie eloquence were lost. Pre 'pared for such extremity, I, deftly enough, whisk aside one step 'draw out, from my interior reservoirs, a sufficient Birmingham 'Horse-pistol, and say, "Be so obliging as retire, Friend (E ziehe sich zurück, Freund), and with promptitude!" This logic 'even the Hyperborean understands: fast enough, with apol 'getic, petitionary growl, he sidles off; and, except for suicidal as well as homicidal purposes, need not return.

'Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it 'makes all men alike tall. Nay, if thou be cooler, cleverer than 'I, if thou have more Mind, though all but no Body whatever. 'then canst thou kill me first, and art the taller. Hereby, at 'last, is the Goliath powerless, and the David resistless; savage 'Animalism is nothing, inventive Spiritualism is all.

With respect to Duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few 'things, in this so surprising world, strike me with more surprise. 'Too little visual Spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough 'cohesion in the midst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve 'therein, at any rate, very soon,-make pause at the distance of 'twelve paces asunder; whirl round; and, simultaneously by the 'cunningest mechanism, explode one another into Dissolution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant! Deuse on it ( dammt), the little spitfires!-Nay, I think with old Hugo von Trimberg: "God must needs laugh outright, could such a thing เ be, to see his wondrous Manikins here below."'

But amid these specialities, let us not forget the great generality, which is our chief quest here: How prospered the inner man of Teufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting? Does Legion still lurk in him, though repressed; or has he exorcised that Devil's Brood? We can answer that the symptoms continue promising. Experience is the grand spiritual Doctor; and with him Teufelsdröckh has now been long a patient, swallowing many a bitter bolus. Unless our poor Friend belong to the numerous class of Incurables, which seems not likely, some cure will doubtless be effected. We should rather say that Legion, or the Satanic School, was now pretty well extirpated and cast out, but next to

nothing introduced in its room; whereby the heart remains, for the while, in a quiet but no comfortable state.

At length, after so much roasting,' thus writes our Autobiographer, I was what you might name calcined. Pray only that it be not rather, as is the more frequent issue, reduced to a • caput-mortuum! But in any case, by mere dint of practice, I had grown familiar with many things. Wretchedness was still wretched; but I could now partly see through it, and despise it. Which highest mortal, in this inane Existence, had I not found a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted; and, when I looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough? Thy wishes have all been sniffed aside, thought I: but what, had they even 'been all granted! Did not the Boy Alexander weep because he had not two Planets to conquer; or a whole Solar System; or ' after that, a whole Universe? Ach Gott, when I gazed into 'these Stars, have they not looked down on me as if with pity, 'from their serene spaces; like Eyes glistening with heavenly 'tears over the little lot of man! Thousands of human generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up of Time, ' and there remains no wreck of them any more; and Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining in 'their courses, clear and young. as when the Shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry little 'Dog-cage of an Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? Thou art still Nothing, Nobody: true; but who then is Something, Somebody? For thee the Family of Man has no use; it rejects thee; thou art wholly as a dissevered limb: so be it; 'perhaps it is better so!'

Too heavy-laden Teufelsdröckh! Yet surely his bands are loosening; one day he will hurl the burden far from him, and bound forth free, and with a second youth.

This,' says our Professor,' was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now reached; through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass.'

CHAPTER IX.

THE EVERLASTING YEA.

'TEMPTATIONS in the Wilderness!' exclaims Teufelsdröck 'Have we not all to be tried with such? Not so easily can the 'old Adam, lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed. Our Life is 'compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life 'itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force; thus have 'we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought bat 'tle. For the God-given mandate, Work thou in Welkicing lies mysteriously written, in Promethean, Prophetic Characters. in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it be 'deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, s 'visible, acted Gospel of Freedom. And as the clay-given man'date, Eat thou and be filled, at the same time persuasively 'proclaims itself through every nerve,-must there not be a con'fusion, a contest, before the better Influence can become the ' upper?

To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man. 'when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within 'him, and the Clay must now be vanquished or vanquish,-should 'be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there fronting 'the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him 'at naught, till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or 'without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and 'sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness, '—to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not 'Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwrit 'ing has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendour but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders, in dull 'pain, in darkness, under earthly vapours !-Our Wilderness is 'the wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are

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ong years of suffering and fasting: nevertheless, to these also omes an end. Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory, yet he consciousness of Battle, and the resolve to persevere therein hile life or faculty is left. To me also, entangled in the enhanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it vas given, after weariest wanderings, to work out my way into he higher sunlit slopes of that Mountain which has no sumnit, or whose summit is in Heaven only!'

He says elsewhere, under a less ambitious figure; as figures e, once for all, natural to him: 'Has not thy Life been that of most sufficient men (tüchtigen Männer) thou hast known in this generation? An outflush of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the first fallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds as valuable herbs: this all parched away, under the Droughts of practical and spiritual Unbelief; as Disappointment, in thought and act, often-repeated gave rise to Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled into Denial! If I have had a second-crop, and now see the perennial greensward, and sit under umbrageous cedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, be the Heavens praised, I am not without examples, and even exemplars.'

So that, for Teufelsdröckh also, there has been a 'glorious revolution: these mad shadow-hunting and shadow-hunted Pilgrimings of his were but some purifying Temptation in the Wilderness,' before his apostolic work (such as it was) could begin; which Temptation is now happily over, and the Devil once more worsted! Was that high moment in the Rue de l'Enfer,' then, properly the turning point of the battle; when the Fiend said, Worship me, or be torn in shreds, and was answered valiantly with an Apage Satana ?-Singular Teufelsdröckh, would thou hadst told thy singular story in plain words! But it is fruitless to look there, in those Paper-bags, for such. Nothing but inuendoes, figurative crotchets a typical Shadow, fitfully wavering, prophetico-satiric; no clear logical Picture. 'How paint to the sensual eye,' asks he once, 'what passes in the Holy#of-Holies of Man's Soul; in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar off of the unspeakable?' We ask in turn: Why perplex these times, profane as they are, with needless obscurity, by omission and by commission? Not mystical only

is our Professor, but whimsical; and involves himself, now m than ever, in eye-bewildering chiaroscuro. Successive glimpse here faithfully imparted, our more gifted readers must endear to combine for their own behoof.

He says: The hot Harmattan-wind had raged itself on 'howl went silent within me; and the long-deafened soul cod now hear. I paused in my wild wanderings; and sat me da 'to wait, and consider; for it was as if the hour of change des 'nigh. I seemed to surrender, to renounce utterly, and Fly, then, false shadows of Hope; I will chase you no more, i 'will believe you no more. And ye too haggard spectres of Fer 'I care not for you; ye too are all shadows and a lie. Let 'rest here: for I am way-weary and life weary; I will rest here " were it but to die: to die or to live is alike to me; alike ing 'nificant. And again: Here, then, as I lay in that CENTRE @ 'INDIFFERENCE; cast, doubtless by benignant upper Influence. 'to a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, 'I awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth. The first pre 'nary moral Act, Annihilation of Self (Sebst-tödtung), had bet 'happily accomplished; and my minds' eyes were now unsealed 'and its hands ungyved.'

Might we not also conjecture that the following passage rek to his Locality, during this same healing sleep;' that his P grim-staff lies cast aside here on the high table-land;' and adeed that the repose is already taking wholesome effect on hia If it were not that the tone, in some parts, has more of rian even of levity, than we could have expected! However, in Tee felsdröckh, there is always the strangest Dualism: light dancing with guitar-music, will be going on in the fore-court, while by fr from within comes the faint whimpering of woe and wail. We transcribe the piece entire :

'Beautiful it was to sit there, as in my skyey Tent, musing and 'meditating; on the high table-land, in front of the Mountains. over me, as roof, the azure Dome, and around me, for walls, fox: azure flowing curtains,—namely, of the Four azure Winds, on 'whose bottom-fringes also I have seen gilding. And then to fancy the fair Castles, that stood sheltered in these Mountain 'hollows; with their green flower lawns, and white dames and