"If in youth," writes he once, "the universe is majestically unveiling, and everywhere heaven revealing itself on earth, nowhere to the young man does this heaven on earth so immediately reveal itself as in the young maiden. Strangely enough, in this strange life of ours, it has been so appointed. On the whole, as I have often said, a Person (Personlichkeit) is ever holy to us; a certain orthodox Anthropomorphism connects my Me with all Thees in bonds of love; but it is in this approximation of the like and unlike, that such heavenly attraction, as between negative and positive, first burns out into a flame. Is the pitifullest mortal person, think you, indifferent to us? Is it not rather our heartfelt wish to be made one with him; to unite him to us, by gratitude, by admiration, even by fear; or, failing all these, unite ourselves to him? But how much more,

Here is conceded us

in this case of the like-unlike! the higher mystic possibility of such a union, the highest in our earth; thus, in the conducting medium of fantasy, flames forth that fire-development of the universal spiritual electricity, which, as unfolded between man and woman, we first emphatically denominate Love.

"In every well-conditioned stripling, as I conjecture, there already blooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve. Nor in the stately vistas, and flowerage, and foliage of that Garden, is a Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof, wanting. Perhaps, too, the whole is but the lovelier if Cherubim and a Flaming Sword divide it from all footsteps of men, and grant him, the imagi

native stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable, celestial barrier; and the sacred aircities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay-hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free!

"As for our young Forlorn," continues Teufelsdröckh, evidently meaning himself, "in his secluded way of life, and with his glowing fantasy, the more fiery that it burnt under cover, as in a reverberating furnace, his feeling towards the queens of this earth was, and indeed is, altogether unspeakable. A visible divinity dwelt in them; to our young friend all women were holy, were heavenly. As yet he but saw them flitting past, in their many-colored angel-plumage; or hovering mute and inaccessible on the outskirts of Esthetic Tea. All of air they were, all soul and form; so lovely, like mysterious priestesses, in whose hand was the invisible Jacob's-Ladder, whereby man might mount into very heaven. That he, our poor friend, should ever win for himself one of these gracefuls (Holden)-Ach Gott! how could he hope it; should he not have died under it? There was a certain delirious vertigo in the thought.

"Thus was the young man, if all-skeptical of demonds and angels, such as the vulgar had once believed in, nevertheless not unvisited by hosts of true skyborn, who visibly and audibly hovered round him, whereso he went; and they had that religious worship in his thought, though as yet it was by their mere earthly and trivial name that he named them. But now, if on a soul so circumstanced, some actual air

6

maiden, incorporated into tangibility and reality, should cast any electric glance of kind eyes, saying thereby, Thou, too, mayest love and be loved;' and so kindle him,-good Heaven, what a volcanic, earthquake-bringing, all-consuming fire were probably kindled !"

Such a fire, it afterwards appears, did actually burst forth, with explosions more or less Vesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes; as, indeed, how could it fail? A nature, which, in his own figurative style, we might say, had now not a little carbonized tinder of irritability; with so much nitre of latent passion, and sulphurous humor enough; the whole lying in such hot neighbourhood, close by "a reverberating furnace of fantasy:" have we not here the components of driest gunpowder, ready, on occasion of the smallest spark, to blaze up? Neither, in this our life-element, are sparks anywhere wanting. Without doubt, some angel, whereof so many hovered round, must one day, leaving "the outskirts of Esthetic Tea, flit nigher; and, by electric, Promethean glance, kindle no despicable firework. Happy, if it indeed proved a firework, and flamed off rocket-wise, in successive beautiful bursts of splendor, each growing naturally from the other, through the several stages of a happy youthful love; till the whole were safely burnt out; and the young soul relieved, with little damage! Happy, if it did not rather prove a conflagration and mad explosion; painfully lacerating the heart itself; nay, perhaps bursting the heart in pieces (which were death); or, at best, bursting the thin walls of your "reverberating furnace," so that it rage thenceforth all unchecked

among the contiguous combustibles (which were madness); till of the so fair and manifold internal world of our Diogenes, there remained nothing, or only the 66 'crater of an extinct volcano !"

From multifarious documents in this bag Capricor nus, and in the adjacent ones on both sides thereof, it becomes manifest that our Philosopher, as stoical and cynical as he now looks, was heartily and even franticly in love; here, therefore, may our old doubts, whether his heart were of stone or of flesh, give way. He loved once; not wisely, but too well. And once only. For as your Congreve needs a new case or wrappage for every new rocket, so each human heart can properly exhibit but one love, if even one; the "first love, which is infinite," can be followed by no second like unto it. In more recent years, accordingly, the Editor of these sheets was led to regård Teufelsdröckh as a man, not only who would never wed, but who would never even flirt; whom the grandclimacteric itself, and St. Martin's Summer of incipient dotage, would crown with no new myrtle garland. To the Professor, women are henceforth pieces of 'art; of celestial art, indeed; which celestial pieces he glories to survey in galleries, but has lost thought of purchasing.

Psychological readers are not without curiosity to see how Teufelsdröckh, in this for him unexampled predicament, demeans himself; with what specialties of successive configuration, splendor, and color, his firework blazes off. Small, as usual, is the satisfaction that such can meet with here. From amid these confused masses of eulogy, and elegy, with their mad

Petrarchan and Werterean ware lying madly scattered among all sorts of quite extraneous matter, not so much as the fair one's name can be deciphered. For, without doubt, the title Blunine, whereby she is here designated, and which means simply Goddess of Flowers, must be fictitious. Was her real name Flora, then? But what was her surname, or had she none? Of what station in life was she; of what parentage, fortune, aspect? Specially, by what preëstablished harmony of occurrences did the lover and the loved meet one another in so wide a world; how did they behave in such meeting? To all which questions, not unessential in a biographic work, mere conjecture must for most part return answer. "It was appointed," says our Philosopher, "that the high, celestial orbit of Blumine should intersect the low, subluminary one of our Frolorn; that he, looking in her empyrean eyes, should fancy the upper sphere of light was come down into this nether sphere of shadows; and finding himself mistaken, make noise enough."

We seem to gather that she was young, hazel-eyed, beautiful, and some one's cousin; highborn, and of high spirit; but, unhappily, dependent and insolvent ; living, perhaps, on the not too gracious bounty of moneyed relatives. But how came "the Wanderer" into her circle? Was it by the humid vehicle of Esthetic Tea, or by the arid one of mere business? Was it on the hand of Herr Towgood; or of the Gnädige Frau, who, as an ornamental artist, might sometimes like to promote flirtation, especially for young, cynical nondescripts? To all appearance, it was chiefly by accident, and the grace of nature.

"Thou fair Waldschloss," writes our Autobiogra