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"Well sang the Hebrew Psalmist; If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the universe, God is there!' Thou too, O cultivated reader, who too probably art no psalmist, but a prosaist, knowing God only by tradition, knowest thou any corner of the world where at least FORCE is not? The drop, which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it swept away; already, on the wings of the north wind, it is nearing the tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou there is aught motionless, without force, and utterly dead?

"As I rode through the Schwarzwald, I said to myself: That little fire, which glows star-like across the dark-growing (nachtende) moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost horseshoe, -is it a detached, separated speck, cut off from the whole universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole? Thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the sun; is fed by air that circulates from before Noah's Deluge, from beyond the dogstar; therein, with iron force, and coal force, and the far stronger force of man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of force brought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in the great vital system of immensity. Call it, if thou wilt, an unconscious altar, kindled on the bosom of the All; whose iron sacrifice, whose iron smoke and influence reach quite through the All; whose dingy priest, not by word, yet by brain and sinew, preaches forth the mystery of force; nay preaches forth (exoterically enough) one

little textlet from the gospel of freedom, the gospel of man's force, commanding, and one day to be all-commanding.

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Detached, separated! I say there is no such separation. Nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost; there are forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? Despise not the rag from which man makes paper, or the litter from which the earth makes corn. Rightly viewed, no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself."

Again, leaving that wondrous Schwarzwald smithyaltar, what vacant, high-sailing air-ships are these, and whither will they sail with us?

"All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all; matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the king's mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning victory over want. On the other hand, all emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven. Must not the imagination weave garments, visible bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our reason are, like spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful ;

the rather if, as we often see, the hand, too, aid her, and (by wool-clothes or otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye?

"Men are properly said to be clothed with authority, clothed with beauty, with curses, and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what is man himself, and his whole terrestrial life, but an emblem; a clothing or visible garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a light particle, down from heaven? Thus is he said, also, to be clothed with a body.

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Language is called the garment of thought; however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought. I said that imagination wove this flesh-garment; and does she not? Metaphors are her stuff. Examine language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but metaphors, recognised as such, or no longer recognised; still fluid and florid, or now solidgrown and colorless? If those same primitive ele

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ments are the osseous fixtures in the flesh-garment, language, then are metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphorical style shall in vain seek for; is not your very attention a stretching-to? The difference lies here: some styles are lean, adust, wiry, the muscle itself seems osseous; some are even quite pallid, hunger-bitten, and dead-looking; while others, again, glow in the flush of health and vigorous self-growth, sometimes (as in my own case) not without an apoplectic tendency. Moreover there are sham metaphors, which, overhanging that same thought's-body (best naked,) and deceptively bedizening or bolstering it out, may

be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz Mäntel), and tawdry woollen rags; whereof he that runs and reads may gather whole hampers,-and burn them."

Than which paragraph on metaphors did the reader ever chance to see a more surprisingly metaphorical? However, that is not our chief grievance; the Professor continues:

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"Why multiply instances? It is written, The heavens and the earth shall fade away like a vesture;' which, indeed, they are; the time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents spirit to spirit, is properly a clothing, a suit of raiment put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus, in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been; the whole external universe and what it holds is but clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES."

Towards these dim, infinitely expanded regions, close bordering on the impalpable Inane, it is not without apprehension, and perpetual difficulties, that the Editor sees himself journeying and struggling. Till lately a cheerful daystar of hope hung before him, in the expected aid of Hofrath Heuschrecke; which daystar, however, melts now, not into the red of morning, but into a vague, gray, half-light, uncertain whether dawn of day or dusk of utter darkness. For the last week, these so called biographical documents are in his hand. By the kindness of a Scottish Hamburgh merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, he must not mention; but

whose honorable courtesy, now and often before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere literary stranger, he cannot soon forget, -the bulky Weissnichtwo packet, with all its custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and miscellaneous tokens of travail, arrived here in perfect safety, and free of cost. The reader shall now fancy with what hot haste it was broken up, with what breathless expectation glanced over; and, alas, with what unquiet disappointment it has, since then, been often thrown down, and again taken up.

Hofrath Heuschrecke, in a too long-winded letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners, dining repartees, and other ephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remind us of what we knew well already: that, however it may be with metaphysics, and other abstract science originating in the head (Verstand) alone, no life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), such as this of Clothes pretends to be, which originates equally in the character (Gesnüth), and equally speaks thereto, can attain its significance till the character itself is known and seen; "till the Author's view of the world (Weltansicht), and how he actively and passively came by such view, are clear; in short, till a biography of him has been philosophico-poetically written, and philosophico-poetically read." “ Nay,” adds he, "were the speculative, scientific truth even known, you still, in this inquiring age, ask yourself, Whence came it, and Why, and How?- and rest not, till, if no better may be, fancy have shaped out an answer; and, either in the authentic lineaments of fact, or the forged ones of fiction, a complete picture and genetical history of the man and his spiritual

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