'then my felicity was perfect.
'from Heaven into the Earth.
'glowed on my horizon, lay even in childhood a dark ring of
'Care, as yet no thicker than a thread, and often quite overshone;
'yet always it reappeared, nay ever waxing broader and broader;
'till in after-years it almost overshadowed my whole canopy, and
'threatened to engulf me in final night. It was the ring of Ne-
'cessity, whereby we are all begirt; happy he for whom a kind
'heavenly Sun brightens it into a ring of Duty, and plays round
'it with beautiful prismatic diffractions; yet ever, as basis and as
bourne for our whole being, it is there.

I had, once for all, come down
Among the rainbow colours that

For the first few years of our terrestrial Apprenticeship, we 'have not much work to do; but, boarded and lodged gratis, are 'set down mostly to look about us over the workshop, and see 'others work, till we have understood the tools a little, and can 'handle this and that. If good Passivity alone, and not good 'Passivity and good Activity together, were the thing wanted, 'then was my early position favourable beyond the most. In all 'that respects, openness of Sense, affectionate Temper, ingenuous 'Curiosity, and the fostering of these, what more could I have 'wished? On the other side, however, things went not so well.

เ

My Active Power (Thatkraft) was unfavourably hemmed in; of 'which misfortune how many traces yet abide with me! In an 'orderly house, where the litter of children's sports is hateful 'enough, your training is too stoical; rather to bear and forbear than to make and do. I was forbid much: wishes in any mea'sure bold I had to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of Obe'dience inflexibly held me down. Thus already Freewill often came in painful collision with Necessity; so that my tears flowed, 'and at seasons the Child itself might taste that root of bitter'ness, wherewith the whole fruitage of our life is mingled and 'tempered.

'In which habituation to Obedience, truly, it was beyond mea'sure safer to err by excess than by defect. Obedience is our 'universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must 'break too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to 'know that Would, in this world of ours, is as mere zero to 'Should, and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to

'Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldly Discretion, 'nay, of Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my upbring 'ing! It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded, every 'way unscientific: yet in that very strictness and domestic soli'tude might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the 'stem from which all noble fruit must grow? Above all, how un'skilful soever, it was loving, it was well-meant, honest; whereby ' every deficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I 'must ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invalu'able service: she taught me, less indeed by word than by act and ' daily reverent look and habitude, her own simple version of the 'Christian Faith. Andreas too attended Church; yet more like 'a parade duty, for which he in the other world expected pay with 'arrears,―as, I trust, he has received; but my Mother, with a 'true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the 'Good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entan'glements of Evil! The highest whom I knew on Earth I here 'saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Hea'ven: such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very 'core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build 'itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the 'divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelop'ment of Fear. Wouldst thou rather be a peasant's son that 'knew, were it never so rudely, there was a God in Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only knew there were two and 'thirty quarters on the family-coach?'

To which last question we must answer: Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of spiritual pride!

CHAPTER III.

PEDAGOGY.

HITHERTO We see young Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellow serge, borne forward mostly on the arms of kind Nature alone; seated, indeed, and much to his mind, in the terrestrial workshop; but (except his soft hazel eyes, which we doubt not already gleamed with a still intelligence) called upon for little voluntary movement there. Hitherto accordingly his aspect is rather generic, that of an incipient Philosopher and Poet in the abstract: perhaps it would puzzle Herr Heuschrecke himself to say wherein the special Doctrine of Clothes is as yet foreshadowed or betokened. For with Gneschen, as with others, the Man may indeed stand pictured in the Boy (at least all the pigments are there); yet only some half of the Man stands in the Child, or young Boy, namely, his Passive endowment, not his Active. The more impatient are we to discover what figure he cuts in this latter capacity; how when, to use his own words, 'he understands the tools a little, and can handle this or that,' he will proceed to handle it.

Here, however, may be the place to state that, in much of our Philosopher's history, there is something of an almost Hindoo character nay, perhaps in that so well fostered and every-way excellent 'Passivity' of his, which, with no free development of the antagonist Activity, distinguished his childhood, we may detect the rudiments of much that, in after-days, and still in these present days, astonishes the world. For the shallow-sighted Teufelsdröckh is oftenest a man without Activity of any kind, a No-man; for the deep-sighted, again, a man with Activity almost superabundant, yet so spiritual, close-hidden, enigmatic, that no mortal can foresee its explosions, or even when it has exploded, so much as ascertain its significance. A dangerous, difficult temper for the

A

modern European; above all, disadvantageous in the hero of a Biography! Now as heretofore it will behove the Editor of these pages, were it never so unsuccessfully, to do his endeavour.

Among the earliest tools of any complicacy which a man, especially a man of letters, gets to handle, are his Class-books. On this portion of his History, Teufelsdröckh looks down professedly as indifferent. Reading he cannot remember ever to have learned;' so perhaps had it by nature. He says generally: Of 'the insignificant portion of my Education, which depended on 'Schools, there need almost no notice be taken. I learned what 'others learnt; and kept it stored by in a corner of my head, 'seeing as yet no manner of use in it. My Schoolmaster, a down'bent, brokenhearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that guild 'are, did little for me, except discover that he could do little: he, 'good soul, pronounced me a genius, fit for the learned profes'sions; and that I must be sent to the Gymnasium, and one day 'to the University. Meanwhile, what printed thing soever I could 'meet with I read. My very copper pocket-money I laid out on 'stall literature; which, as it accumulated, I with my own hands. 'sewed into volumes. By this means was the young head fur'nished with a considerable miscellany of things and shadows of things: History in authentic fragments lay mingled with Fabu'lous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the whole not as 'dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive for a mind 'not yet so peptic.'

That the Entepfuhl Schoolmaster judged well, we now know. Indeed, already in the youthful Gneschen, with all his outward stillness, there may have been manifest an inward vivacity that promised much; symptoms of a spirit singularly open, thoughtful almost poetical. Thus, to say nothing of his Suppers on the Orchard-wall, and other phenomena of that earlier period, have many readers of these pages stumbled, in their twelfth year, on such reflections as the following? It struck me much, as I sat 'by the Kuhbach, one silent noontide, and watched it flowing, 'gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had flowed and gur'gled, through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond 'the earliest date of History. Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the mid-day when Cæsar

'doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his Commenta ries dry, this little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas or 'Siloa, was murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, 'unseen; here, too, as in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein 'or veinlet of the grand World-circulation of Waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, has lasted and lasts simply with the 'World. Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest Art 'a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years 'of age.' In which little thought, as in a little fountain, may there not lie the beginning of those well-nigh unutterable meditations on the grandeur and mystery of TIME, and its relation to ETERNITY, which play such a part in this Philosophy of Clothes?

Over his Gymnastic and Academic years the Professor by no means lingers so lyrical and joyful as over his childhood. Green sunny tracts there are still; but intersected by bitter rivulets of tears, here and there stagnating into sour marshes of discontent. 'With my first, view of the Hinterschlag Gymnasium,' writes he, my evil days Legan. Well do I still remember the red sunny 'Whitsuntide morning, when trotting full of hope, by the side of 'Father Andreas, I entered the main street of the place, and saw 'its steeple clock (then striking Eight) and Schuldthurm (Jail), and the aproned or disaproned Burghers moving in to break'fast a little dog, in mad terror, was rushing past; for some 'human imps had tied a tin kettle to its tail; thus did the 'agonised creature, loud jingling, career through the whole length 'of the Borough, and become notable enough. Fit emblem of 'many a Conquering Hero, to whom Fate (wedding Fantasy to 'Sense, as it often elsewhere does) has malignantly appended a 'tin kettle of Ambition, to chase him on; which, the faster he 'runs, urges him the faster, the more loudly and more foolishly! 'Fit emblem also of much that awaited myself, in that mischievous Den; as in the world, whereof it was a portion and ' epitome!

'Alas, the kind beech-rows of Entepfuhl were hidden in the 'distance I was among strangers, harshly, at best indifferently, 'disposed towards me; the young heart felt, for the first time, 'quite orphaned and alone.' His schoolfellows, as is usual, persecuted him: They were Boys,' he says, 'mostly rude Boys, and