nos, or what we call TIME, devours all his children; only by incessant running, by incessant working, may you (for some threescore and ten years) escape him; and you, too, he devours at last. Can any sovereign, or holy alliance of sovereigns, bid time stand still; even in thought, shake themselves free of time? Our whole terrestrial being is based on time, and built of time; it is wholly a movement, a time impulse; time is the author of it, the material of it. Hence also our whole duty, which is to move, to work,—in the right direction. Are not our bodies and our souls in continual movement, whether we will or not; in a continual waste, requiring a continual repair? Utmost satisfaction of our whole outward and inward wants were but satisfaction for a space of time; thus whatso we have done is done, and for us annihilated, and ever must we go and do anew. O Time-Spirit; how hast thou environed and imprisoned us, and sunk us so deep in thy troublous, dim time-element, that, only in lucid moments, can so much as glimpses of our upper azure home be revealed to us! Me, however, as a son of time, unhappier than some others, was time threatening to eat quite prematurely; for, strive as I might, there was no good running, so obstructed was the path, so gyved were the feet." That is to say, we presume,

speaking in the dialect of this lower world, that Teufelsdröckh's whole duty and necessity were, like other men's "to work,-in the right direction," and that no work was to be had; whereby he became wretched enough. As was natural; with haggard scarcity threatening him in the distance; and so vehement a soul lan

guishing in restless inaction, and forced thereby, like Sir Hudibras's sword by rust,

To eat into itself, for lack

Of something else to hew and hack!

But on the whole, that same "excellent passivity," as it has all along done, is here again vigorously flourishing; in which circumstance, may we not trace the beginnings of much that now characterizes our Professor; and perhaps, in faint rudiments, the origin of the Clothes-Philosophy itself? Already the attitude he has assumed towards the world is too defensive; not, as would have been desirable, a bold attitude of attack. "So far, hitherto," he says, "as I had mingled with mankind, I was notable, if for anything, for a certain stillness of manner, which, as my friends often rebukingly declared, did but ill express the keen ardor of my feelings. I, in truth, regarded men with an excess both of love and of fear. The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine, to him that has a sense for the godlike. Often, notwithstanding, was I blamed, and by half-strangers hated, for my socalled hardness (Härte), my indifferentism towards men, and the seemingly ironic tone I had adopted, as my favorite dialect in conversation. Alas, the panoply of sarcasm was but as a buckram-case, wherein I had striven to envelop myself; that so my own poor person might live safe there; and in all friendliness, being no longer exasperated by wounds. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it. But how many individuals did I, in those days, provoke into some degree of hostility thereby!

An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambuscading ways, more especially an ironic young man, from whom it is least expected, may be viewed as a pest to society. Have we not seen persons of weight and name, coming forward, with gentlest indifference, to tread such a one out of sight, as an insignificancy and worm, start ceiling-high (balkenhoch), and thence fall shattered and supine, to be borne home on shutters, not without indignation, when he proved electric and a torpedo !"

Alas, how can a man with this devilishness of temper make way for himself in life; where the first problem, as Teufelsdröckh, too, admits, is "to unite yourself with some one and with somewhat (sich anzuschliessen) ?" Division, not union, is written on most part of his procedure. Let us add, too, that, in no great length of time, the only important connexion he had ever succeeded in forming, his connexion with the Zähdarm family, seems to have been paralyzed, for all practical uses, by the death of the "not uncholeric" old Count. This fact stands recorded, quite incidentally, in a certain Discourse on Epitaphs, huddled into the present bag, among so much else; of which essay the learning and curious penetration are more to be approved of than the spirit. His grand principle is, that lapidary inscriptions, of what sort soever, should be historical rather than lyrical. "By request of that worthy nobleman's survivors," says he, "I undertook to compose his epitaph; and, not unmindful of my own rules, produced the following; which, however, for an alleged defect of Latinity, a defect never yet fully visible to myself, still remains unen

graven;"

--

wherein, we may predict, there is more than the Latinity that will surprise an English reader.

CHAPTER V.

ROMANCE.

"FOR long years," writes Teufelsdröckh, “had the poor Hebrew, in this Egypt of an Auscultatorship, painfully toiled, baking bricks without stubble, before ever the question once struck him with entire force: For what?-Beym Himmel! For food and warmth! And are food and warmth nowhere else, in the whole wide universe, discoverable? Come of it what might, I resolved to try."

Thus, then, are we to see him in a new, independent capacity, though, perhaps, far from an improved one. Teufelsdröckh is now a man without profession. Quitting the common fleet of herring-busses and whalers, where, indeed, his leeward, laggard condition was painful enough, he desperately steers off, on a course of his own, by sextant and compass of his own. Unhappy Teufelsdröckh! Though neither fleet, nor traffic, nor commodores pleased thee, still was it not a fleet, sailing in prescribed track, for fixed objects; above all, in combination, wherein, by mutual guidance, by all manner of loans and borrowings, each could manifoldly aid the other? How wilt thou sail in unknown seas; and for thyself find that shorter, northwest passage to thy fair spice-country of a Nowhere? A solitary rover, on such a voyage, with such nautical tactics, will meet with adventures. Nay, as we forthwith discover, a certain Calypso-Island detains him at the very outset; and, as it were, falsifies and oversets his whole reckoning.