'booby and bustard, by his limbs; most Kings and Queens by 'being born under such and such a bed-tester; Boileau Des 'preaux (according to Helvetius) by the peck of a turkey; and 'this ill-starred individual by a rent in his breeches, for no Me'moirist of Kaiser Otto's Court omits him. Vain was the prayer 'of Themistocles for a talent of Forgetting: my Friends, yield 'cheerfully to Destiny, and read since it is written.'-Has Teufelsdröckh to be put in mind that, nearly related to the impossible talent of Forgetting, stands that talent of Silence, which even travelling Englishmen manifest? 'The simplest costume,' observes our Professor, 'which I any'where find alluded to in History, is that used as regimental,. by 'Bolivar's Cavalry, in the late Columbian wars. A square 'Blanket, twelve feet in diagonal, is provided (some were wont to 'cut off the corners, and make it circular): in the centre a slit is 'effected eighteen inches long; through this the mother-naked 'Trooper introduces his head and neck; and so rides shielded 'from all weather, and in battle from many strokes (for he rolls 'it about his left arm); and not only dressed, but harnessed and 'draperied.' With which picture of a State of Nature, affecting by its singu larity, and Old-Roman contempt of the superfluous, we shall quit this part of our subject. 15* CHAPTER VIII. THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES. Ir in the Descriptive-Historical Portion of this Volume, Teufelsdröckh, discussing merely the Werden (Origin and successive Improvement) of Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more will he in the Speculative-Philosophical Portion, which treats of their Wirken or Influences. It is here that the present Editor first feels the pressure of his task; for here properly the higher and new Philosophy of Clothes commences: an untried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos; in venturing upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is it to know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where the footing is firm substance and will bear us, where it is hollow, or mere cloud, and may engulf us! Teufelsdröckh undertakes no less than to expound the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man's earthly interests ' are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.' He says in so many words, 'Society is founded upon Cloth;' and again, Society sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a 'Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean 'beasts in the Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, 'would sink to endless depths, or mount to inane limboes, and in ' either case be no more.' By what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Med itation this grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, each holding by the skirts of the other; but at best that of practical Reason, proceeding by large Intuition over 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 Icí 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 'wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: 'but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written 'Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a 'boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the 'faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge 'thereof: sounds and many-coloured visions fit around our 'sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream 'and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking mo'ments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a 'glorious Rainbow; but the Sun that made it lies behind us, 'hidden from us. Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch 'at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while 'fancying ourselves most awake! Which of your Philosophical 'Systems is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confi'dently given out, where divisor and dividend are both unknown? 'What are all your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats, ' and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the Somnambulism ' of uneasy Sleepers? This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what 6 we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly 'wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are 'wise who know that they know nothing. 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 igno'rance 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-mor'tar; 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 6 '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! 6 'So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air'image, 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 Earth'Spirit in Faust names it, the living visible Garment of God: "In Being's floods, in Action's storm, I walk and work, above, beneath, 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 |