father, dost thou still, shut out from me only by thin, penetrable curtains of earthly space, wend to and fro among the crowd of the living? Or art thou hidden by those far thicker curtains of the everlasting night, or rather of the everlasting day, through which my mortal eye and outstretched arms need not strive to reach ? Alas! I know not, and in vain vex myself to know. More than once, heart-deluded, have I taken for thee this and the other noble looking stranger; and approached him wistfully, with infinite regard; but he too must repel me, he too was not thou.

"And yet, O man born of woman," cries the autobiographer, with one of his sudden whirls, "wherein is my case peculiar? Hadst thou, any more than I, a father whom thou knowest? The Andreas and Gretchen, or the Adam and Eve, who led thee into life, and for a time suckled and pap-fed thee there, whom thou namest father and mother; these were, like mine, but thy nursing father and nursing mother; thy true Beginning and Father is in heaven, whom with the bodily eye thou shalt never behold, but only with the spiritual."

"The little green veil," adds he, among much similar moralizing and embroiled discoursing, "I yet keep; still more inseparably the name, Diogenes Teufelsdrückh. From the veil can nothing be inferred; piece of now quite faded Persian silk, like thousands of others. On the name I have many times meditated and conjectured; but neither in this lay there any clue. That is was my unknown father's name I must hesitate to believe. To no purpose have I searched through all the herald's books, in and with

out the German Empire, and through all manner of subscriber-lists (Pränumeranten,) militia rolls, and other name-catalogues; extraordinary names as we have in Germany, the name Teufelsdröckh, except as appended to my own person, nowhere occurs. Again, what may the unchristian rather than Christian Diogenes' mean? Did that reverend basket-bearer intend by such designation, to shadow forth my future destiny, or his own present malign humor? Perhaps the latter, perhaps both. Thou ill-starred parent, who like an ostrich must leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatched into self-support by the mere sky-influence s of chance, can thy pilgrimage have been a smooth one? Beset by misfortune thou doubtless hast been; or, indeed, by the worst figure of misfortune, by misconduct. Often have I fancied how, in thy hard lifebattle, thou wert shot at and slung at, wounded, handfettered, hamstrung, browbeaten, and bedevilled, by the time-spirit (Zeitgeist) in thyself and others, till the good soul first given thee was seared into grim rage; and thou hadst nothing for it but to leave in me an indignant appeal to the future, and living, speaking protest against the devil, as that same spirit, not of the time only, but of time itself, is well named! Which appeal and protest, may I now modestly add, was not perhaps quite lost in air.

"For, indeed, as Walter Shandy often insisted, there is much, nay, almost all, in names. The name is the earliest garment you wrap round the earth-visiting ME; to which it thenceforth cleaves more tenaciously (for there are names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin. And know from without.

what mystic influences does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic first times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seed-grain will grow to be an all-overshadowing tree! Names! Could I unfold the influence of names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus. Not only all common speech, but science, poetry itself, is no other, if thou consider it, than a right naming. Adam's first task was giving names to natural appearances. What is ours still but a continuation of the same; be the appearances exotic-vegetable, organic, mechanic, stars, or starry movements (as in science); or, (as in poetry) passions, virtues, calamities, god-attributes, gods? In a very plain sense the proverb says, Call one a thief, and he will steal; in an almost similar sense, may we not perhaps say, Call one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, and he will open the Philosophy of Clothes."

"Meanwhile the incipient Diogenes, like others, all ignorant of his Why, his How, or Whereabout, was opening his eyes to the kind light; sprawling out his ten fingers and toes; listening, tasting, feeling; in a word, by all his five senses, still more by his sixth sense of hunger, and a whole infinitude of inward, spiritual, half-awakened senses, endeavouring daily to acquire for himself some knowledge of this strange universe where he had arrived, be his task therein what it might. Infinite was his progress; thus, in some fifteen months, he could perform the miracle of -speech! To breed a fresh soul is it not like brooding a fresh (celestial) egg; wherein as yet all is form

less, powerless; yet by degrees organic elements and fibres shoot through the watery albumen; and out of vague sensation, grows thought, grows fantasy and force, and we have philosophies, dynasties, nay, poetries and religions!

"Young Diogenes, or rather young Gneschen, for by such diminutive had they in their fondness named him, travelled forward to those high consummations, by quick, yet easy stages. The Futterals, to avoid vain talk, and moreover keep the roll of gold Friedrichs safe, gave out that he was a grand-nephew; the orphan of some sister's daughter, suddenly deceased, in Andreas's distant Prussian birth-land; of whom, as of her indigent, sorrowing widower, little enough was known at Entepfuhl. Heedless of all which, the nursling took to his spoon-meat, and throve. I have heard him noted as a still infant, that kept his mind much to himself; above all, that seldom or never cried. He already felt that time was precious; that he had other work cut out for him than whimpering."

Such, after utmost painful search and collation among these miscellaneous paper-masses, is all the notice we can gather of Herr Teufelsdröckh's genealogy. More imperfect, more enigmatic it can seem to few readers than to us, The Professor, in whom truly we more and more discern a certain satirical turn, and deep under-currents of roguish whim, for the present stands pledged in honor, so we will not doubt him. But seems it not conceivable that, by the "good Gretchen Futteral," or some other perhaps interested party, he has himself been deceived? Should these

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sheets, translated or not, ever reach the Entepfuhl Circulating Library, some cultivated native of that district might feel called to afford explanation. Nay, since books, like invisible scouts, permeate the whole habitable globe, and Tombuctoo itself is not safe from British literature, may not some copy find out even the mysterious, basket-bearing stranger, who in a state of extreme senility perhaps still exists; and gently force en him to disclose himself; to claim openly a son, in who any father may feel pride?

CHAPTER II.

IDYLLIC.

"HAPPY season of childhood!" exclaims Teufelsdröckh. "Kind nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut with auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hath provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope, wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round (umgäukelt) by sweetest dreams! If the paternal cottage still shuts us in, its roof still screens us; with a father we have as yet a prophet, priest, and king, and an obedience that makes us free. The young spirit has awakened out of eternity, and knows not what we mean by time; as yet time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful, sunlit ocean; years to the child are as ages. Ah! the secret of vicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal world-fabric,