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'Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close 6 atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Fur'nace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when, 'all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: ""What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou 'for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the snm-total of the worst that lies 'before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of 'Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do ' against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer 'whatso it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, tram'ple Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let 'it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!" And as I so 'thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; ' and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, ' of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that 'time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whin'ing Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.

Thus had the EVERLASTING No (das ewige Nein) pealed ' authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; I 'and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God'created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such

a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be 'fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: "Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's);" to 'which my whole ME now made answer: "I am not thine, but 'Free, and forever hate thee!"

'It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual Newbirth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly there'upon began to be a Man.'

CHAPTER VIII.

CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE.

THOUGH, after this 'Baphometic Fire-baptism' of his, our Wanderer signifies that his Unrest was but increased; as, indeed, 'Indignation and Defiance,' especially against things in general, are not the most peaceable inmates; yet can the Psychologist surmise that it was no longer a quite hopeless Unrest; that henceforth it had at least a fixed centre to revolve round. For the fire-baptised soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feeling is its Baphometic Baptism: the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battling, will doubtless by degrees be conquered and pacificated. Under another figure, we might say, if in that great moment, in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, the old inward Satanic School was not yet thrown out of doors, it received peremptory judicial notice to quit ;-whereby, for the rest, its howl-chantings, Ernulphus-cursings, and rebellious gnashing of teeth, might, in the mean while, become only the more tumultuous, and difficult to keep secret.

Accordingly, if we scrutinize these Pilgrimings well, there is perhaps discernible henceforth a certain incipient method in their madness. Not wholly as a Spectre does Teufelsdröckh now storm through the world; at worst as a spectre-fighting Man, nay who will one day be a Spectre-queller. If pilgriming restlessly to so many 'Saints' Wells,' and ever without quenching of his thirst, he nevertheless finds little secular wells, whereby from time to time some alleviation is ministered. In a word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to eat his own heart;' and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-ME for wholesomer

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food. Does not the following glimpse exhibit him in a much more natural state?

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'Towns also and Cities, especially the ancient, I failed not to 'look upon with interest. How beautiful to see thereby, as through a long vista, into the remote Time; to have, as it were, 6 an actual section of almost the earliest Past brought safe into 'the Present, and set before your eyes! There, in that old City, was a live ember of Culinary Fire put down, say only two thou'sand years ago; and there, burning more or less triumphantly, 'with such fuel as the region yielded, it has burnt, and still 'burns, and thou thyself seest the very smoke thereof. Ah! and 'the far more mysterious live ember of Vital Fire was then also 'put down there; and still miraculously burns and spreads; and 'the smoke and ashes thereof (in these Judgment-Halls and 'Churchyards), and its bellows-engines (in these Churches), thou 'still seest; and its flame, looking out from every kind counte( nance, and every hateful one, still warms thee or scorches thee. 'Of Man's Activity and Attainment the chief results are ' aeriform, mystic, and preserved in Tradition only: such are his 'Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest on; his 'Customs, or Fashions both of Cloth-Habits and of Soul-habits; 'much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty 'he has required of manipulating Nature: all these things, as 'indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be 'fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable 'vehicles, from Father to Son; if you demand sight of them, they เ are nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammer'men there have been, ever from Cain and Tubalcain downwards : 'but where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and 'other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused? It transmits 'itself on the atmospheric air, on the sun's rays (by Hearing and 'by Vision); it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual In like manner, ask me not, Where are the LAWS; where 'is the GOVERNMENT? In vain wilt thou go to Schönbrunn, to 'Downing Street, to the Palais Bourbon: thou findest nothing 'there, but brick or stone houses, and some bundles of Papers 'tied with tape. Where then is that same cunningly-devised 6 almighty GOVERNMENT of theirs to be laid hands on? Every

'sort.

'where, yet nowhere: seen only in its works, this too is a thing 'acriform, invisible; or if you will, mystic and miraculous. So 'spiritual (geistig) is our whole daily Life: all that we do springs 'out of Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force; only like a little Cloud'image, or Armida's Palace, air-built, does the Actual body itself 'forth from the great mystic Deep.

Visible and tangible products of the Past, again, I reckon up to the extent of three: Cities, with their Cabinets and 'Arsenals; then tilled Fields, to either or to both of which divisions Roads with their Bridges may belong; and thirdly'Books. In which third truly, the last-invented, lies a worth far 'surpassing that of the two others. Wondrous indeed is the vir'tue of a true Book. Not like a dead city of stones, yearly 'crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a tilled field, but 'then a spiritual field: like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it 'stands from year to year, and from age to age (we have Books 'that already number some hundred-and-fifty human ages); and ' yearly comes its new produce of leaves (Commentaries, Deduc'tions, Philosophical, Political Systems; or were it only Ser'mons, Pamphlets, Journalistic Essays), every one of which is 'talismanic and thaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. O thou 'who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or 'oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they 6 name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name 'Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast 'built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder'bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.— Fool! why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fer‘vour, to gaze on the stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones ' of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and 'inert, looking over the Desert, foolishly enough, for the last 'three thousand years: but canst thou not open thy Hebrew 'BIBLE, then, or even Luther's Version thereof ?'

No less satisfactory is his sudden appearance not in Battle, yet on some Battle-field; which, we soon gather, must be that of Wagram: so that here, for once, is a certain approximation to

distinctness of date. Omitting much, let us impart what follows:

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'Horrible enough! A whole Marchfield strewed with shell'splinters, cannon shot, ruined tumbrils, and dead men and horses; stragglers still remaining not so much as buried. And 'those red mould heaps: ay, there lie the Shells of Men, out of 'which all the Life and Virtue has been blown; and now are they swept together, and crammed down out of sight, like blown Egg-shells!-Did Nature, when she bade the Donau bring 'down his mould cargoes from the Carinthian and Carpathian Heights, and spread them out here into the softest, richest 'level, intend thee, O Marchfield, for a corn-bearing Nursery, 'whereon her children might be nursed; or for a Cockpit, wherein 'they might the more commodiously be throttled and tattered? 'Were thy three broad highways, meeting here from the ends of Europe, made for Ammunition-wagons then? Were thy Wagrams and Stillfrieds but so many ready-built Casemates, 'wherein the house of Hapsburg might batter with artillery, and 'with artillery be battered? König Ottokar, amid yonder hil'locks, dies under Rodolf's truncheon; here Kaiser Franz falls 'a-swoon under Napoleon's: within which five centuries, to omit 'the others, how has thy breast, fair Plain, been defaced and 'defiled! The greensward is torn up and trampled down; man's 'fond care of it, his fruit-trees, hedge-rows, and pleasant dwell'ings, blown away with gunpowder; and the kind seedfield lies 'a desolate, hideous Place of Sculls.-Nevertheless, Nature is at 'work; neither shall these Powder-Devilkins with their utmost 'devilry gainsay her: but all that gore and carnage will be 'shrouded in, absorbed into manure; and next year the March'field will be green, nay, greener. Thrifty unwearied Nature, 'ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of thy 'own, how dost thou, from the very carcass of the Killer, bring 'Life for the Living.

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What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net pur'port and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, 'there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, 'usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "Na'tural Enemies" of the French, there are successively selected,