over the mirror of waters, like a tremulous fire pillar, shooting downwards to the abyss, and hide itself under my feet. In such moments, solitude also is invaluable; for who would speak, or be looked on, when behind him lies all Europe and Africa, fast asleep, except the watchmen; and before him the silent immensity, and palace of the Eternal, whereof our sun is but a porch-lamp.

"Nevertheless, in this solemn moment, comes a man or monster, scrambling from among the rockhollows; and, shaggy, huge as the Hyperborean bear, hails me in Russian speech; most probably, therefore, a Russian smuggler. With courteous brevity, I signify my indifference to contraband trade, my humane intentions, yet strong wish to be private. In vain; the monster, counting doubtless on his superior stature, and minded to make sport for himself, or perhaps profit, were it with murder, continues to advance ; ever assailing me with his importunate, train-oil breath; and now has advanced, till we stand both on the verge of the rock, the deep sea rippling greedily down below. What argument will avail? On the thick Hyperborean, cherubic, reasoning, seraphic eloquence was lost. Prepared for such extremity, I, deftly enough, whisk aside one step; draw out, from my interior reservoirs, a sufficient Birmingham horsepistol, and say: Be so obliging as retire, friend (Er ziche sich zurück, Freund), and with promptitude!' This logic even the Hyperborean understands; fast enough, with apologetic, petitionary growl, he sidles off; and, except for suicidal, as well as homicidal purposes, need not return.

"Such I hold to be the genuine use of gunpowder;

that it makes all men alike tall. Nay, if thou be cooler, cleverer than I, if thou have more mind, though all but no body whatever, then canst thou kill me first, and art the taller. Hereby, at least, is the Goliath powerless, and the David resistless; savage animalism is nothing, inventive spiritualism is all.

"With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things, in this so surprising world, strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon,-make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl round; and simultaneously, by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and off-hand become air, and non-extant! Deuce on it (verdammt)! the little spitfires! Nay, I think, with old Hugo von Trimberg: God must needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, to see his wondrous mannikins here below.'"

But amid these specialities, let us not forget the great generality, which is our chief quest here: How prospered the inner man of Teufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting? Does Legion still lurk in him, though repressed; or has he exorcised that Devil's brood? We can answer that the symptoms continue promising. Experience is the grand spiritual doctor; and with him Teufelsdröckh has now been long a patient, swallowing many a bitter bolus. Unless our poor friend belong to the numerous class of incurables, which seems not likely, some cure will doubtless be effected. We should rather say that

Legion or the Satanic school, was now pretty well extirpated and cast out, but next to nothing introduced in its room; whereby the heart remains, for the while, in a quiet, but no comfortable state.

"At length, after so much roasting," thus writes our Autobiographer, "I was what you might name calcined. Pray only that it be not rather, as is the more frequent issue, reduced to a caput-mortuum! But in any case, by mere dint of practice, I had grown familiar with many things. Wretchedness was still wretched; but I could now partly see through it, and despise it. Which highest mortal, in this inane existence, had I not found a shadow-hunter or shadowhunted; and, when I looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough? Thy wishes have all been sniffed aside, thought I; but what, had they even been all granted! Did not the boy Alexander weep because he had not two planets to conquer; or a whole solar system; or, after that, a whole universe? Ach Gott! when I gazed into these stars, have they not looked down on me, as if with pity, from their serene spaces; like eyes glistening with heavenly tears over the little lot of man? Thousands of human generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up of time, and there remains no wreck of them any more; and Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry, little dog-cage of an earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? Thou art still nothing, nobody; True; but who, then, is something, somebody? For thee the family of man has no

use; it rejects thee; thou art wholly as a dissevered, limb. So be it; perhaps it is better so!"

Too heavy-laden Teufelsdröckh! Yet surely his bands are loosening; one day he will hurl the burden far from him, and bound forth free, and with a second youth.

“This," says our Professor," was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now reached; through which whoso travels from the negative pole to the positive must necessarily pass."

CHAPTER IX.

THE EVERLASTING YEA.

"TEMPTATIONS in the wilderness!" exclaims Teufelsdröckh; "have we not all to be tried with such ? Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed. Our life is compassed round with necessity; yet is the meaning of life itself no other than freedom, than voluntary force; thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle. For the God-given mandate, Work thou in well-doing, lies mysteriously written, in Promethean, prophetic characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, a visible, acted gospel of freedom. And as the clay-given mandate, Eat thou and be filled, at the same time persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve,

-must there not be a con

fusion, a contest, before the better influence can become the upper?

Name it as we

"To me nothing seems more natural than that the son of man, when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the clay must now be vanquished or vanquish,-should be carried of the spirit into grim solitudes, and there fronting the tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at nought, till he yield and fly. choose; with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous, moral desert of selfishness and baseness, to such temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but half men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendor; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights; or smoulders, in dull pain, in darkness, under earthly vapors!-Our wilderness is the wide world in an atheistic century; our forty days are long years of suffering and fasting; nevertheless, to these also comes an end. Yes, to me also was given, if not victory, yet the consciousness of battle, and the resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty is left. To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after weariest wanderings, to work out my way into the higher, sunlit slopes of that, mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in heaven only!"

He says elsewhere, under a less ambitious figure; as figures are, once for all, natural to him; "Has not thy life been that of most sufficient men (tüchtigen Männer) thou hast known in this generation? An