what else? Are they not souls rendered visible; in bodies, that took shape, and will lose it, melting into air? Their solid pavement is a picture of the sense: they walk on the bosom of nothing; blank time is behind them and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes-screen yonder, with spurs on its heels, and feather in its crown, is but of to-day, without a yesterday or a to-morrow; and had not rather its ancestor alive when Hengst and Horsa overran thy island? Friend, thou seest here a living link in that tissue of history which inweaves all being; watch well, or it will be past thee, and seen no more.”

"Ach mein Lieber!" said he once, at midnight, when he had returned from the coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to dwell here. These fringes of lamp-light, struggling up through smoke and thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his hunting-dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has laid down to rest, and the chariot-wheels of vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her, and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad, - that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick life, is heard in heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlid of vapors, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are praying-on the other side of a brick parti

tion men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw. In obscure cellars, Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice of destiny to haggard, hungry villains; while councillors of state sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are men. The lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders; the thief, still more silently, sets to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and music, and high-swelling hearts; but, in the condemned cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow; comes no hammering from the Rabenstein ?

their gallows must even now be o' building. Upwards of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie around us, in horizontal position; their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid, dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten. — All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them; crammed in, like salted fish, in their barrel; or

weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others; such work goes on under that smokecounterpane! But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the stars."

We looked in his face to see whether, in the utterance of such extraordinary night-thoughts, no feeling might be traced there but with the light we had, which, indeed, was only a single tallow light, and far enough from the window, nothing save that old calmness and fixedness was visible.

These were the Professor's talking seasons; most commonly he spoke in mere monosyllables, or sat altogether silent, and smoked; while the visitor had liberty either to say what he listed, receiving for answer an occasional grunt; or to look round for a space, and then take himself away. It was a strange apartment; full of books and tattered papers, and miscellaneous shreds of all conceivable substances, "united in a common element of dust." Books lay on tables, and below tables; here fluttered a sheet of manuscript, there a torn handkerchief, or nightcap hastily thrown aside; ink-bottles alternated with breadcrusts, coffee-pots, tobacco-boxes, periodical literature, and Blücher boots. Old Leischen (Lisekin, 'Liza), who was his bed-maker and stove-lighter, his washer and wringer, cook, errand-maid, and general lion's-provider, and for the rest a very orderly creature, had no sovereign authority in this last citadel of Teufelsdröckh; only some once in the month she half-forcibly made her way thither, with broom and duster, and (Teufelsdröckh hastily saving his manu

scripts) effected a partial clearance, a jail-delivery of such lumber as was not literary. These were her Erdbebungen (Earthquakes), which Teufelsdröckh dreaded worse than the pestilence; nevertheless, to such length he had been forced to comply. Glad would he have been to sit here philosophizing forever, or till the litter, by accumulation, drove him out of doors; but Leischen was his right arm, and spoon, and necessary of life, and would not be flatly gainsayed. We can still remember the ancient woman; so silent that some thought her dumb; deaf also you would often have supposed her; for Teufelsdröckh and Teufelsdröckh only would she serve or give heed to; and with him she seemed to communicate chiefly by signs; if it were not rather by some secret divination that she guessed all his wants and supplied them. Assiduous old dame! she scoured, and sorted, and swept, in her kitchen, with the least possible violence to the ear; yet all was tight and right there; hot and black came the coffee ever at the due moment; and the speechless Leischen herself looked out on you, from under her clean white coif with its lappets, through her clean withered face and wrinkles, with a look of helpful intelligence, almost of benevolence.

Few strangers, as above hinted, had admittance hither; the only one we ever saw there, ourselves excepted, was the Hofrath Heuschrecke, already known, by name and expectation, to the readers of these pages. To us, at that period, Herr Heuschrecke seemed one of those purse-mouthed, cranenecked, clean-brushed, pacific individuals, perhaps sufficiently distinguished in society by this fact, that,

in dry weather or in wet, “ they never appear without their umbrella. " Had we not known with what "little wisdom" the world is governed; and how, in Germany as elsewhere, the ninety and nine public men can for most part be but mute trainbearers to the hundredth, perhaps but stalking-horses and willing or unwilling dupes, it might have seemed wonderful how Herr Heuschrecke should be named a Rath, or councillor, and counsellor, even in Weissnichtwo. What counsel to any man, or to any woman, could this particular Hofrath give; in whose loose zigzag figure; in whose thin visage, as it went jerking to and fro, in minute incessant fluctuation,-you traced rather confusion worse confounded; at most, timidity and physical cold? Some, indeed, said withal, he was "the very spirit of love embodied;" blue, earnest eyes, full of sadness and kindness; purse ever open, and so forth the whole of which, we shall now hope for many reasons was not quite groundless. Nevertheless, friend Teufelsdröckh's outline, who, indeed, handled the burine like few in these cases, was probably the best: Er hat Gemuth und Geist, hat wenigstens gehabt, doch ohne Organ, ohne Schicksals-gunst; ist gegenwärtig aber halb-zerrüttet, halb-erstarrt," He has heart and talent, at least has had such, yet without fit mode of utterance, or favor of fortune; and so is now half-cracked, half-congealed."-What the Hofrath shall think of this, when he sees it, readers may wonder; we, safe in the stronghold of historical fidelity, are careless.

The main point, doubtless, for us all, is his love of Teufelsdröckh, which, indeed, was also by far the most