collision with such, a certain warmth, a certain polish. was communicated; by instinct and happy accident, I took less to rioting (renommiren), than to thinking and reading, which latter also I was free to do. Nay, from the chaos of that liberty, I succeeded in fishing up more books, perhaps, than had been known to the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a literary life was hereby laid. I learned on my own strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects, and sciences; farther, as man is ever the prime object to man, already it was my favourite employment to read character in speculation, and from the writing to construe the writer. A certain ground-plan of human nature and life began to fashion itself in me; wondrous enough, now when I look back on it; for my whole universe, physical and spiritual, was as yet a machine! However, such a conscious, recognised ground-plan, the truest I had, was beginning to be there, and by additional experiments might be corrected and indefinitely extended."

Thus from poverty does the strong educe nobler wealth; thus in the destitution of the wild desert, does our young Ishmael acquire for himself the highest of all possessions, that of self-help. Nevertheless a desert this was, waste, and howling with savage monsters. Teufelsdröckh gives us long details of his "fever-paroxysms of doubt;" his inquiries concerning miracles, and the evidences of religious faith; and how "in the silent night-watches, still darker in his heart than over sky and earth, he has cast himself before the All-seeing, and with audible prayers cried vehemently for light, for deliverance from death and the grave. Not

till after long years, and unspeakable agonies, did the believing heart surrender; sink into spell-bound sleep, under the nightmare, unbelief; and, in this hag-ridden dream, mistake God's fair, living world for a palid, vacant Hades and extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain," continues he, "it is appointed us to pass. First must the dead letter of religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living spirit of religion, freed from this its charnal-house, is to arise on us, newborn of heaven, and with new healing under its wings."

To which Purgatory pains, seemingly severe enough, if we add a liberal measure of earthly distresses, want of practical guidance, want of sympathy, want of money, want of hope; and all this in the fervid season of youth, so exaggerated in imagining, so boundless in desires, yet here so poor in means, do we not see a strong incipient spirit oppressed and overloaded from without and from within; the fire of genius struggling up among fuel-wood of the greenest, and as yet with more of bitter vapor than of clear flame?

From various fragments of letters and other documentary scraps, it is to be inferred that Teufelsdröckh, isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not altogether escaped notice. Certain established men are aware of his existence; and, if stretching out no helpful hand, have at least their eyes on him. He appears, though in dreary enough humor, to be addressing himself to the profession of law;-whereof, indeed, the world has since seen him a public graduate. But omitting these broken, unsatisfactory thrums of economical relation, let us present rather the following

small thread of moral relation; and therewith, the reader for himself weaving it in at the right place, conclude our dim arras-picture of these university years.

"Here also it was that I formed acquaintance with Herr Towgood, or, as it is perhaps better written, Herr Toughgut; a young person of quality (von Adel), from the interior parts of England. He stood connected, by blood and hospitality, with the Counts von Zähdarm, in this quarter of Germany; to which noble family I likewise was, by his means, with all friendliness brought near. Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably ill-cultivated; with considerable humor of character; and, bating his total ignorance, for he knew nothing except boxing and a little grammar, showed less of that aristocratic impassivity and silent fury than for most part belongs to travellers of his nation. To him I owe my first practical knowledge of the English and their ways; perhaps also something of the partiality with which I have ever since regarded that singular people. Towgood was not without an eye, could he have come at any light. Invited, doubtless, by the presence of the Zähdarm family, he had travelled hither, in the almost frantic hope of perfecting his studies; he, whose studies had been as yet those of infancy, hither to a university where so much as the notion of perfection, not to say the effort after it, no longer existed! Often we would condole over the hard destiny of the young in this era; how, after all our toil, we were to be turned out into the world, with beards on our chins, indeed, but with few other attributes of manhood; no existing

thing that we were trained to act on, nothing that we could so much as believe. How has our head on the outside a polished hat,' would Towgood exclaim, ' and in the inside vacancy, or a froth of vocables and attorney-logic! At a small cost men are educated

to make leather into shoes; but, at a great cost, what am I educated to make? By Heaven, brother! what I have already eaten and worn, as I came thus far, would endow a considerable Hospital of Incurables.'

Man, indeed,' I would answer, 'has a digestive faculty, which must be kept working, were it even partly by stealth. But as for our miseducation, make not bad worse; waste not the time, yet ours, in trampling on thistles because they have yielded us no figs. Frisch zu, Bruder! Here are books, and we have brains to read them; here is a whole earth and a whole heaven, and we have eyes to look on them; Frisch zu!"

"Often also our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even fire. We looked out on life, with its strange scaffolding, where all at once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quartered; motley, not unterrific was the aspect; but we looked on it like brave youths. For myself, these were perhaps my most genial hours. Towards this young, warmhearted, strong-headed, and wrong-headed Herr Towgood, I was even near experiencing the now obsolete sentiment of friendship. Yes, foolish heathen that I was, I felt that, under certain conditions, I could have loved this man, and taken him to my bosom, and been his brother once and always. By degrees, however, I understood the new time, and its wants.

If

man's soul is indeed, as in the Finnish language, and utilitarian philosophy, a kind of stomach, what else is the true meaning of spiritual union but an eating together? Thus we, instead of friends, are dinnerguests; and here, as elsewhere, have cast away chimeras."

So ends, abruptly as is usual, and enigmatically, this little incipient romance. What henceforth becomes of the brave Herr Towgood, or Toughgut? He has dived under, in the autobiographical chaos, and swims we see not where. Does any reader "in the interior parts of England" know of such a man?

CHAPTER IV.

GETTING UNDER WAY.

"THUS nevertheless," writes our autobiographer, apparently as quitting college, "was there realized somewhat; namely, I, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh; a visible, temporary figure (Zeitbild), occupying some cubit feet of space, and containing within its forces both physical and spiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts; the whole wondrous furniture, in more or less perfection, belonging to that mystery, a man. Capabilities there were in me to give battle, in some small degree, against the great empire of darkness. Does not the very ditcher and delver, with his spade, extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little order, where he found the opposite? Nay, your very day