in that preternatural hour, has she bound and spellbound thee. "Love is not altogether a delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which discerning, again, may be either true or false, either seraphic or demoniac, inspiration or insanity.

But in the former case, too, as in common madness, it is fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual, plants its Archimedes'-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy I might call the true heaven-gate and hell-gate of man; his sensuous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbühne), whereon thick-streaming influences from both these far yet near regions meet visibly and act tragedy and melodrama. Sense can support herself handsomely, in most countries, for some eighteen pence a day; but for fantasy planets and solar systems will not suffice. Witness your Pyrrhus conquering the world, yet drinking no better red wine. than he had before." Alas, witness also your Diogenes, flame-clad, scaling the upper heaven, and verging towards insanity, for prize of a "high-souled brunette," as if the earth held but one, and not several of these!

He says that in town they met again. "Day after day, like his heart's sun, the blooming Blumine shone on him. Ah! a little while ago, and he was yet all in darkness him what Graceful (Holde) would ever love? Disbelieving all things, the poor youth had never learned to believe in himself. Withdrawn, in proud timidity, within his own fastnesses; solitary

from men, yet baited by night-spectres enough, he saw himself, with a sad indignation, constrained to renounce the fairest hopes of existence. And now, O now! 'She looks on thee,' cried he; 'she, the fairest, noblest; do not her dark eyes tell thee, thou art not despised? The heaven's-messenger! All heaven's blessings be hers!' Thus did soft melodies flow through his heart; tones of an infinite gratitude; sweetest intimations that he also was a man, that for him also unutterable joys had been provided.

"In free speech, earnest or gay, amid lambent glances, laughter, tears, and often with the inarticulate, mystic speech of music; such was the element they now lived in; in such a many-tinted, radiant Aurora; and by this fairest of orient light-bringers must our friend be blandished, and the new Apocalypse of nature unrolled to him. Fairest Blumine! And, even as a star, all fire and humid softness, a very light-ray incarnate! Was there so much as a fault, a 'caprice,' he could have dispensed with? Was she not to him, in very deed, a morning-star; did not her presence bring with it airs from heaven ? As from Eolian harps in the breath of dawn, as from the Memnon's statue struck by the rosy finger of Aurora, unearthly music was around him, and lapped him into untried, balmy rest. Pale doubt fled away to the distance; life bloomed up with happiness and hope. The past, then, was all a haggard dream; he had been in the garden of Eden, then, and could not discern it! But lo, now! the black walls of his prison melt away; the captive is alive, is 'free. If he loved his disenchantress? Ach Gott! His whole heart and soul and life were hers, but never had he named

it Love; existence was all a feeling, not yet shaped into a thought."

Nevertheless, into a thought, nay into an action, it must be shaped; for neither disenchanter nor disenchantress, mere "children of time," can abide by feeling alone. The Professor knows not, to this day, "how, in her soft, fervid bosom, the Lovely found determination, even on hest of necessity, to cut asunder these so blissful bonds." He even appears surprised at the "Duenna cousin," whoever she may have been, in whose meagre, hunger-bitten philosophy, the religion of young hearts was, from the first, faintly approved of." We, even at such distance, can explain it without necromancy. Let the Philosopher answer this one question: What figure," at that period, was a Mrs. Teufelsdröckh likely to make in polished society? Could she have driven so much as a brassbound gig, or even a simple iron-spring one? Thou foolish, "absolved Auscultator," before whom lies no prospect of capital, will any yet known "religion of young hearts" keep the human kitchen warm? Pshaw! thy divine Blumine, when she "resigned herself to wed some richer," shows more philosophy, though but "a woman of genius," than thou, a pretended man.

Our readers have witnessed the origin of this lovemania, and with what royal splendor it waxes and rises. Let no one ask us to unfold the glories of its dominant state; much less the horrors of its almost instantaneous dissolution. How, from such inorganic masses, henceforth madder than ever, as lie in these bags, can even fragments of a living delineation be organized? Besides, of what profit were it? We view, with a lively pleasure, the gay silk Montgolfier

start from the ground, and shoot upwards, cleaving the liquid deeps, till it dwindle to a luminous star; but what is there to look longer on, when once, by natural elasticity, or accident of fire, it has exploded? A hapless air-navigator, plunging, amid torn parachutes, sandbags, and confused wreck, fast enough, into the jaws of the Devil! Suffice it to know that Teufelsdröckh rose into the highest regions of the empyrean, by a natural, parabolic track, and returned thence in a quick, perpendicular one. For the rest, let any feeling reader, who has been unhappy enough to do the like, paint it out for himself; considering only that if he, for his perhaps comparatively insignificant mistress, underwent such agonies and frenzies, what must Teufelsdröckh's have been, with a fire-heart, and for a nonpareil Blumine! We glance merely at the final scene :

"One morning, he found his morning-star all dimmed and dusky-red; the fair creature was silent, absent; she seemed to have been weeping. Alas, no longer a morning-star, but a troublous, skyey portent, announcing that the Doomsday had dawned! She said in a tremulous voice, they were to meet no more." The thunderstruck air-sailor is not wanting to himself in this dread hour; but what avails it? We omit the passionate expostulations, entreaties, indignations, since all was vain, and not even an explanation was conceded him; and hasten to the catastrophe. "Farefell, then, madam! said he, not without sternness, for his stung pride helped him. She put her hand in his, she looked in his face, tears started to her eyes; in wild audacity he clasped her to his bosom; their lips were joined, their two souls,

like two dewdrops, rushed into one, -for the first time, and for the last?" Thus was Teufelsdröckh made immortal by a kiss. And then? Why, then"thick curtains of night rushed over his soul, as rose the immeasurable crash of doom; and through the ruins, as of a shivered universe, was he falling, falling towards the abyss.

CHAPTER VI.

SORROWS OF TEUFELSDRÖCKн.

We have long felt that, with a man like our Professor, matters must often be expected to take a course of their own; that, in so multiplex, intricate a nature, there might be channels, both for admitting and emitting, such as the psychologist had seldom noted; in short, that, on no grand occasion and convulsion, neither in the joy-storm nor in the wo-storm, could you predict his demeanour.

To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so passionate Teufelsdröckh, precipitated through "a shivered universe" in this extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic poetry; or blow out his brains. In the progress towards any of which consummations, do not such readers anticipate extravagance enough; breast-beating, brow-beating (against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemy and the like, stampings, smitings, breakages of furniture, if not arson itself?