clutching at them!-Can we not, in all such cases, rather say: Take it, thou too-ravenous individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest; take it with a blessing; would to heaven I had enough for thee!'-If Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre be, to a certain extent, Applied Christianity,' surely to a still greater extent, so is this. We have here not a Whole Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namely, the passive half; could we but do it, as we can demonstrate it!

"But, indeed, conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into conduct. Nay, properly, conviction is not possible till then, inasmuch as all speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices; only by a felt, indubitable certainty of experience, does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system. Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by action.' On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: the duty which lies nearest thee,' which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Do

"May we not say, however, that the hour of spiritual enfranchisement is even this: when your ideal world, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough, like the Lothario in Wilhelm Meister, that your America is here or nowhere'?

6

The situation that has not its duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment, too, is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or of that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou, that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth the thing thou seekest is already with thee, here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!

"But it is with man's soul as it was with nature; the beginning of creation is light. Till the eye. have vision, the whole members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be light!' Ever to the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least? The mad primeval discord is hushed; the rudely jumbled, conflicting elements bind themselves into separate firmaments; deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting luminaries above; instead of a dark, wasteful chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heavenencompassed world.

66

"I, too, could now say to myself: Be no longer a chaos, but a world, or even worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest, infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God's name! 'T is the

utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called to-day, for the night cometh wherein no man can work."

CHAPTER X.

PAUSE.

THUS have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as in such circumstances might be, followed Teufelsdröckh through the various successive states and stages of growth, entanglement, unbelief, and almost reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to consider as Conversion. "Blame not the word," says he, "rejoice rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our modern era, though hidden from the wisest ancients. The old world knew nothing of Conversion; instead of an Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules. It was a new-attained progress in the moral development of man; hereby has the highest come home to the bosoms of the most limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists."

It is here, then, that the spiritual majority of Teufelsdröckh commences; we are henceforth to see him "work in well-doing," with the spirit and clear aims of a man. He has discovered that the ideal workshop,

he so panted for, is even this same actual, ill-furnished workshop he has so long been stumbling in. He can say to himself: "Tools? Thou hast no tools? Why, there is not a man, or a thing, now alive, but has tools. The basest of created animalcules, the spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom, within its head; the stupidest of oysters has a Papin's digester, with stone and-lime house to hold it in; every being that can live can do something; this let him do.-Tools? Hast thou not a brain, furnished, furnishable with some glimmerings of light; and three fingers to hold a pen withal? Never, since Aaron's rod went out of practice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working tool; greater than all recorded miracles have been performed by pens. For strangely in this so solid-seeming world, which nevertheless is in continual, restless flux, it is appointed that sound, to appearance the most fleeting, should be the most continuing of all things. The WORD is well said to be omnipotent in this world; man, thereby divine, can create as by a Fiat. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee; what God has given thee; what the Devil shall not take away. Higher task than that of priesthood was allotted to no man; wert thou but the meanest in that sacred hierarchy, is it not honor enough therein to spend and be spent?

"By this art, which whoso will may sacrilegiously degrade into a handicraft," adds Teufelsdröckh, "have I thenceforth abidden. Writings of mine, not, indeed, known as mine (for what am I?), have fallen, perhaps not altogether void, into the mighty seedfield of opin. ion; fruits of my unseen sowing gratifyingly meet me here and there. I thank the heavens that I have now

found my calling; wherein, with or without perceptible result, I am minded diligently to persevere.

-

"Nay, how knowest thou," cries he, "but this and the other pregnant device, now grown to be a worldrenowned, far-working institution; like a grain of right mustard-seed once cast into the right soil, and now stretching out strong boughs to the four winds, for the birds of the air to lodge in, may have been properly my doing? Some one's doing it without doubt was; from some idea in some single head it did first of all take beginning: why not from some idea in mine?" Does Teufelsdröckh here glance at that "SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATION OF PROPERTY (Eigenthums-conservirende Gesellschaft)," of which so many ambiguous notices glide spectre-like through these inexpressible paper-bags ? "An institution," hints he, "not unsuitable to the wants of the time; as, indeed, such sudden extension proves; for already can the society number, among its office-bearers or corresponding members, the highest names, if not the highest persons, in Germany, England, France; and contributions, both of money and of meditation, pour in from all quarters; to, if possible, enlist the remaining integrity of the world, and, defensively and with forethought, marshal it round this palladium." Does Teufelsdröckh mean, then, to give himself out as the originator of that so notable Eigenthums-conservirende. ("Owndom-conserving") Gesellschaft; and, if so, what, in the Devil's name, is it? He again hints: "At a time when the divine commandment, Thou shalt not steal, wherein, truly, if well understood, is comprised the whole Hebrew Decalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgus's Constitutions, Justinian's