"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 favorable 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. My active power (Thatkraft) was unfavorably 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 measure bold I had to renounce; every where a strait bond of obedience 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 bitterness, wherewith the whole fruitage of our life is mingled and tempered.

"In which habituation to obedience, truly it was beyond measure 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 upbringing! It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded, every way unscientific; yet in that very strictness and domestic solitude might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble fruit must grow? Above all, how unskilful 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 invaluable 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. entanglements of evil! The highest whom I knew on earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in heaven, 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 envelopment of fear.X 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 deepsighted, 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. Α dangerous, difficult temper for the 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 learn.; and kept it stored by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet no manner of use in it. My schoolmaster, a downbent, brokenhearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that guild are, did little for me, except discover that he could do little. He, good soul, pronouced me genius, fit for the learned professions; and that I

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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 pocketmoney 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 furnished with a considerable miscellany of things and shadows of things. History in authentic fragments lay mingled with fabulous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the whole, not as dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive for a mind as 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 its flowing, gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, 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 Commentaries 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