'her no Falsehood! though a whole celestial Lubberland were 'the price of Apostacy." In conduct it was the same. Had a 'divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculous Handwriting 'on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me This thou shalt 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 'Philosophies, 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 my 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.'

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 'Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a differ'ence! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and de'cisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the 'spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into 'this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.

'But for me, so strangely unprosperous had I been, the net result of my Workings amounted as yet simply to-Nothing. 'How then could I believe in my Strength, when there was as 'yet no mirror to see it in? Ever did this agitating, yet, as I 'now perceive, quite frivolous question, remain to me insoluble: 'Hast thou a certain Faculty, a certain Worth, such even as the 'most have not; or art thou the completest Dullard of these 'modern times? Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in your'self; and how could I believe? Had not my first, last Faith in 'myself, when even to me the Heavens seemed laid open, and I

dared to love, been all-too cruelly belied? The speculative 'Mystery of Life grew ever more mysterious to me; neither in 'the practical Mystery had I made the slightest progress, but 'been everywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast out. A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed 'to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own 'wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchant'ment, divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, 'No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: why should 'I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends, in 'whose withered, vain, and too hungry souls, Friendship was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when 'I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in. The 'men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures: I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that 'they were not merely automatic. In midst of their crowded 'streets, and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage 'also, as the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have 'been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and 'tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, 6 though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age ' of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled 'down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the 'Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of 'Hostility it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, 'rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why 'was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? 'Why if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?'

A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as the worst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a Teufelsdröckh threaten to fail? We conjecture that he has known sickness; and, in spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of the chronic sort. Hear this, for example: How beautiful to 'die of broken-heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in Prac

'tice; every window of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as 'it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can 'enter; a whole Drugshop in your inwards; the foredone soul 'drowning slowly in quagmires of Disgust!'

Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we not find in the following sentences, quite in our Profes'sor's still vein, significance enough? From Suicide a certain 'after-shine (Nachschein) of Christianity withheld me: perhaps 'also a certain indolence of character; for, was not that a remedy 'I had at any time within reach? Often, however, was there a 'question present to me: Should some one now, at the turning ' of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, into the other 'World, or other No-world, by pistol-shot,-how were it? On 'which ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged cities 'and other death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which 'passed, falsely enough, for courage.'

'So had it lasted,' concludes the Wanderer, 'so had it lasted, 'as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The 'heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was 'smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since ' earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, 'murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, that wild 'Selig der den er im Sieges-glanze findet (Happy whom he finds in 'Battle's splendour), and thought that of this last Friend even I 6 was not forsaken, that destiny itself could not doom me not to 'die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it 'of Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, 'could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but 'rise to me, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, 'strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; 'tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what it 'seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth 'beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were 'but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpita'ting, waited to be devoured.

'Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dogday, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue

Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close 'atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Fur nace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when, 'all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: "What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the snm-total of the worst that lies 'before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of 'Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do ' against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer 'whatso it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, tram'ple Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let 'it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!" And as I so 'thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; ' and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, ' of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that 'time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whin'ing Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.

Thus had the EVERLASTING No (das ewige Nein) pealed ' authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME: 'and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God 'created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such 'a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same 'Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be 'fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: "Behold, thou art 'fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's);" to 'which my whole ME now made answer: "I am not thine, but 'Free, and forever hate thee!"

It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual Newbirth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.'

CHAPTER VIII.

CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE.

THOUGH, after this Baphometic Fire-baptism' of his, our Wanderer signifies that his Unrest was but increased; as, indeed, 'Indignation and Defiance,' especially against things in general, are not the most peaceable inmates; yet can the Psychologist surmise that it was no longer a quite hopeless Unrest; that henceforth it had at least a fixed centre to revolve round. For the fire-baptised soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feeling is its Baphometic Baptism: the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battling, will doubtless by degrees be conquered and pacificated. Under another figure, we might say, if in that great moment, in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, the old inward Satanic School was not yet thrown out of doors, it received peremptory judicial notice to quit ;—whereby, for the rest, its howl-chantings, Ernulphus-cursings, and rebellious gnashing of teeth, might, in the mean while, become only the more tumultuous, and difficult to keep secret.

Accordingly, if we scrutinize these Pilgrimings well, there is perhaps discernible henceforth a certain incipient method in their madness. Not wholly as a Spectre does Teufelsdröckh now storm through the world; at worst as a spectre-fighting Man, nay who will one day be a Spectre-queller. If pilgriming restlessly to so many 'Saints' Wells,' and ever without quenching of his thirst, he nevertheless finds little secular wells, whereby from time to time some alleviation is ministered. In a word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to 'eat his own heart;' and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-ME for wholesomer