similitude of wings, whereon the summoned garments come to alight; and ever, as he slowly cleaves the air, sounds forth his deep, fateful note, as if through a trumpet he were proclaiming: Ghosts of life, come to judgment.' Reck not, ye fluttering ghosts; he will purify you in his Purgatory, with fire and with water; and one day, new-created ye shall reappear. Oh! let him in whom the flame of devotion is ready to go out, who has never worshipped, and knows not what to worship, pace and repace, with austerest thought the pavement of Monmouth Street, and say whether his heart and his eyes still continue dry. If Field Lane, with its long fluttering rows of yellow handkerchiefs, be a Dionysius's Ear, where, in stifled, jarring hubbub, we hear the indictment which poverty and vice bring against lazy wealth, that it has left them there cast out and trodden under foot of want, darkness, and the Devil, then is Monmouth Street a Mirza's Hill, where, in motley vision, the whole pageant of existence passes awfully before us; with its wail and jubilee, mad loves and mad hatreds, churchbells and gallows ropes, farce-tragedy, beast-godhood, -the Bedlam of creation!"

To most men, as it does to ourselves, all this will seem overcharged. We, too, have walked through Monmouth Street; but with little feeling of "Devotion;" probably in part because the contemplative process is so fatally broken in upon by the brood of money-changers, who nestle in that Church, and importune the worshipper with merely secular proposals. Whereas Teufelsdröckh might be in that happy middle-state, which leaves to the clothes-broker no

hope either of sale or of purchase, and so be allowed to linger there without molestation. - Something we would have given to see the little philosophical figure, with its steeple-hat and loose-flowing skirts, and eyes in a fine frenzy, "pacing and repacing in austerest thought" that foolish street; which to him was a true Delphic avenue, and supernatural whispering-gallery, where the "Ghosts of Life" rounded strange secrets in his ear. O thou philosophic Teufelsdröckh, that listenest while others only gabble, and with thy quick tympanum hearest the grass grow!

At the same time, is it not strange that, in paperbag documents, destined for an English work, there exists nothing like an authentic diary of this his sojourn in London; and of his meditations among the Clothes-shops, only the obscurest emblematic shadows? Neither, in conversation (for, indeed, he was not a man to pester you with his travels), have we heard him more than allude to the subject.

For the rest, however, it cannot be uninteresting that we here find how early the significance of Clothes had dawned on the now so distinguished ClothesProfessor. Might we but fancy it to have been even in Monmouth Street, at the bottom of our own English "ink-sea," that this remarkable volume first took being, and shot forth its salient point in his soul, — as in Chaos did the egg of Eros, one day to be hatched into a universe!

CHAPTER VII.

ORGANIC FILAMENTS.

FOR us, who happen to live while the World-Phenix is burning herself, and burning so slowly that, as Teufelsdröckh calculates, it were a handsome bargain would she engage to have done "within two centuries," there seems to lie but an ashy prospect. Not altogether so, however, does the Professor figure it. "In the living subject," says he, "change is wont to be gradual. Thus, while the serpent sheds its old skin, the new is already formed beneath. Little knowest thou of the burning of a World-Phenix, who fanciest that she must first burn out, and lie as a dead cinereous heap; and therefrom the young one start up by miracle, and fly heavenward. Far otherwise! In that fire-whirlwind, creation and destruction proceed together; ever as the ashes of the old are blown about, do organic filaments of the new mysteriously spin themselves; and amid the rushing and the waving of the whirlwind-element, come tones of a melodious death-song, which end not but in tones of a more melodious birth-song. Nay, look into the fire-whirlwind with thy own eyes, and thou wilt see." Let us actually look, then. To poor individuals, who cannot expect to live two centuries, those same organic filaments, mysteriously spinning themselves, will be the best part of the spectacle. First, therefore, this of mankind in general:

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In vain thou deniest it," says the Professor; "thou art my brother. Thy very hatred, thy very envy, those foolish lies thou tellest of me in thy

splenetic humor; what is all this but an inverted sympathy? Were I a steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to tell lies of me. Not thou! I should grind

all unheeded, whether badly or well.

"Wondrous, truly, are the bonds that unite us one and all; whether by the soft binding of love, or the iron chaining of necessity, as we like to choose it. More than once, have I said to myself, of some perhaps whimsically strutting figure, such as provokes whimsical thoughts: Wert thou, my little brotherkin, suddenly covered up with even the largest imaginable glass-bell, what a thing it were, not for thyself only, but for the world! Post letters, more or fewer, from all the four winds, impinge against thy glass walls, but must drop unread. Neither from within comes there question or response into any post-bag; thy thoughts fall into no friendly ear or heart, thy manufacture into no purchasing hand; thou art no longer a circulating venous-arterial heart, that, taking and giving, circulatest through all space and all time. There has a hole fallen out in the immeasurable, universal world-tissue, which must be darned up again!'

"Such venous-arterial circulation, of letters, verbal messages, paper and other packages, going out from him and coming in, is a blood-circulation, visible to the eye; but the finer nervous circulation, by which all things, the minutest that he does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curses whomso it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or new cursing; all this you cannot see, but only imagine. I say, there is not a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but

the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical fact, that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

"If now an existing generation of men stand so woven together, not less indissolubly does generation with generation. Hast thou ever meditated on that word, Tradition: how we inherit not life only, but all the garniture and form of life; and work, and speak, and even think and feel, as our fathers, and primeval grandfathers, from the beginning, have given it us? Who printed thee, for example, this unpretending volume on the Philosophy of Clothes? Not the Herren Stillschweigen and Company; but Cadmus of Thebes, Faust of Mentz, and innumerable others whom thou knowest not. Had there been no Mæsogothic Ulfila, there had been no English Shakspeare, or a different one. Simpleton! it was Tubalcain that made thy very tailor's needle, and sewed that court-suit of thine.

"Yes, truly, if nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is mankind, the image that reflects and creates nature, without which nature were not. As palpable life-streams in that wondrous individual, mankind, among so many life-streams that are not palpable, flow on those main-currents of what we call opinion; as preserved in institutions, polities, churches, above all in books. Beautiful it is to understand and know that a thought did never yet die; that as thou, the originator thereof, hast gathered it and created it from the whole past, so thou wilt transmit it to the whole future. It is thus that the heroic heart, the seeing eye, of the first times, still