a contested election? Leave him to time, and the medicating virtue of nature."

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Yes, friends," elsewhere observes the Professor, "not our logical, mensurative faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us; I might say, priest and prophet, to lead us heavenward; or magician and wizard, to lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest sensualist, what is sense but the implement of fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest existence, there is a sheen either of inspiration or of madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in from the circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little islet of Time. The understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat, for a piece of glazed cotton which they called their flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian nation rise, like some tumultuous, moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value, little differing from a horseshoe? It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being. Those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the godlike?

"Of symbols, however, I remark farther, that they

have both an extrinsic and intrinsic value; oftenest the former only. What, for instance, was in that clouted shoe which the Peasants bore aloft with them as ensign in their Bauernkrieg (Peasants' War)? Or in the wallet-and-staff round which the Netherland Gueux, glorying in that nickname of Beggars, heroically rallied and prevailed, though against King Philip himself? Intrinsic significance these had none; only extrinsic; as the accidental standards of multitudes more or less sacredly uniting together; in which union itself, as above noted, there is ever something mystical and borrowing of the godlike. Under a like category, too, stand or stood, the stupidest heraldic coats-of-arms; military banners everywhere; and generally, all national or other sectarian costumes and customs. They have no intrinsic, necessary divineness or even worth; but have acquired an extrinsic one. Nevertheless through all these there glimmers something of a divine idea; as through military banners themselves, the divine idea of duty, of heroic daring; in some instances, of freedom, of right. Nay, the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental, extrinsic one.

"Another matter it is, however, when your symbol has intrinsic meaning, and is of itself fit that men should unite round it. Let but the Godlike manifest itself to sense; let but Eternity look, more or less visibly, through the Time-figure (Zeitbild)! Then is it fit that men unite there, and worship together before such symbol; and so from day to day, and from age to age, superadd to it new divineness.

"Of this latter sort are all true works of art; in

them (if thou know a work of art from a daub of artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking through Time; the Godlike rendered visible. Here, too, may an intrinsic value gradually superadd itself. Thus certain Iliads, and the like, have, in three thousand years, attained quite new significance. But nobler than all in this kind are the lives of heroic, Godinspired men; for what other work of art is so divine? In death, too, in the death of the just, as the last perfection of a work of art, may we not discern symbolic meaning? In that divinely transfigured sleep, as of victory, resting over the beloved face which now knows thee no more, read (if thou canst, for tears) the confluence of Time with Eternity, and some gleam of the latter peering through.

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Highest of all symbols are those wherein the artist or poet has risen into prophet, and all men can recognise a present God, and worship the same; I mean religious symbols. Various enough have been such religious symbols, what we call Religions; as men stood in this stage of culture or the other, and could worse or better body forth the Godlike; some symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man has carried it in this matter, look on our divinest symbol; on Jesus of Nazareth, and his life, and his biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human thought not yet reached. This is Christianity and Christendom; a symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.

"But, on the whole, as time adds much to the

star.

sacredness of symbols, so likewise in his progress he at length defaces, or even desecrates them; and symbols, like all terrestrial garments, wax old. Homer's Epos has not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like a receding It needs a scientific telescope, it needs to be reïnterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much as know that it was a sun. So likewise a day comes when the Runic Thor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an African Mumbo-Jumbo, and Indian Wau-Wau be utterly abolished. For all things, even celestial luminaries, much more atmospheric meteors, have their rise, their culmination, their decline."

"Small is this which thou tellest me, that the royal sceptre is but a piece of gilt wood; that the Pyx has become a most foolish box, and truly, as Ancient Pistol thought, of little price.' A right conjuror might I name thee, couldst thou conjure back into these wooden tools the divine virtue they once held."

"Of this thing, however, be certain; wouldst thou plant for eternity, then plant into the deep, infinite faculties of man, his fantasy and heart; wouldst thou plant for year and day, then plant into his shallow, superficial faculties, his self-love and arithmetical understanding, what will grow there. A hierarch, therefore, and pontiff of the world will we call him, the poet and inspired maker, who, Prometheus-like, can shape new symbols, and bring new fire from heaven to fix it there. Such, too, will not always be wanting; neither, perhaps, now are. Meanwhile, as the average of matters goes, we account him legislator and

wise who can so much as tell when a symbol has grown old, and gently remove it.

"When, as the last English* coronation was preparing," concludes this wonderful Professor, "I read

in their newspapers that the Champion of England,' he who must offer battle to the universe for his new king, had brought it so far that he could now mount his horse with little assistance,' I said to myself: Here also have we a symbol well nigh superannuated. Alas, move whithersoever you may, are not the tatters and rags of superannuated, worn-out symbols (in this rag-fair of a world) dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tether you; nay, if you shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce suffocation ?"

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CHAPTER IV.

HELOTAGE.

At this point we determine on adverting shortly, or rather, reverting, to a certain tract of Hofrath Heuschrecke's, entitled Institute for the Repression of Population; which lies, dishonourably enough (with torn leaves, and a perceptible smell of aloetic drugs), stuffed into the bag Pisces. Not, indeed, for sake of the tract itself, which we admire little; but of the marginal notes, evidently in Teufelsdrückh's hand,

* Now, last but one.-ED.