nothing introduced in its room; whereby the heart remains, for the while, in a quiet but no comfortable state.

'At length, after so much roasting,' thus writes our Autobiographer, 'I was what you might name calcined. Pray only that 'it be not rather, as is the more frequent issue, reduced to a caput-mortuum! But in any case, by mere dint of practice, I 'had grown familiar with many things. Wretchedness was still 'wretched; but I could now partly see through it, and despise it. 'Which highest mortal, in this inane Existence, had I not found 'a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted; and, when I looked 'through his brave garnitures, miserable enough? Thy wishes 'have all been sniffed aside, thought I: but what, had they even 'been all granted! Did not the Boy Alexander weep because he 'had not two Planets to conquer; or a whole Solar System; or 'after that, a whole Universe? Ach Gott, when I gazed into 'these Stars, have they not looked down on me as if with pity, 'from their serene spaces; like Eyes glistening with heavenly 'tears over the little lot of man! Thousands of human genera'tions, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up of Time, ' and there remains no wreck of them any more; and Arcturus 'and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining in 'their courses, clear and young, as when the Shepherd first noted 'them in the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry little 'Dog-cage of an Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? 'Thou art still Nothing, Nobody: true; but who then is Some'thing, Somebody? For thee the Family of Man has no use; it ' rejects thee; thou art wholly as a dissevered limb: so be it; 'perhaps it is better so!'

Too heavy-laden Teufelsdröckh! Yet surely his bands are loosening; one day he will hurl the burden far from him, and bound forth free, and with a second youth.

'This,' says our Professor,' was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE 'I had now reached; through which whoso travels from the 'Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass.'

CHAPTER IX.

THE EVERLASTING YEA.

TEMPTATIONS in the Wilderness!' exclaims Teufelsdröckh : 'Have we not all to be tried with such ? Not so easily can the 'old Adam, lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed. Our Life is 'compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life 'itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force; thus have 'we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought bat'tle. For the God-given mandate, Work thou in Welldoing, 'lies mysteriously written, in Promethean, Prophetic Characters, 'in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it be 'deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, a 'visible, acted Gospel of Freedom. And as the clay-given man'date, Eat thou and be filled, at the same time persuasively 'proclaims itself through every nerve,-must there not be a con'fusion, a contest, before the better Influence can become the 'upper?

'To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, 'when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay must now be vanquished or vanquish,-should 'be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there fronting 'the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at naught, till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or ' without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and 'sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness, '-to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not. 'Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwrit'ing has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendour; 'but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders, in dull 'pain, in darkness, under earthly vapours !—Our Wilderness is 'the wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are

'long years of suffering and fasting: nevertheless, to these also 6 comes an end. Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory, yet 'the consciousness of Battle, and the resolve to persevere therein 'while life or faculty is left. To me also, entangled in the en'chanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after weariest wanderings, to work out my way into 'the higher sunlit slopes-of that Mountain which has no sum'mit, or whose summit is in Heaven only !'

He says elsewhere, under a less ambitious figure; as figures are, once for all, natural to him: 'Has not thy Life been that of ' most sufficient men (tüchtigen Männer) thou hast known in this 'generation? An outflush of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the 'first fallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds as valuable herbs : 'this all parched away, under the Droughts of practical and 'spiritual Unbelief; as Disappointment, in thought and act, ' often-repeated gave rise to Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled 'into Denial! If I have had a second-crop, and now see the peren'nial greensward, and sit under umbrageous cedars, which defy 'all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, be the Heavens praised, I 'am not without examples, and even exemplars.'

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So that, for Teufelsdröckh also, there has been a 'glorious revolution:' these mad shadow-hunting and shadow-hunted Pilgrimings of his were but some purifying Temptation in the Wilderness,' before his apostolic work (such as it was) could begin; which Temptation is now happily over, and the Devil once more worsted! Was that high moment in the Rue de Enfer,' then, properly the turning point of the battle; when the Fiend said, Worship me, or be torn in shreds, and was answered valiantly with an Apage Satana?-Singular Teufelsdröckh, would thou hadst told thy singular story in plain words! But it is fruitless to look there, in those Paper-bags, for such. Nothing but inuendoes, figurative crotchets a typical Shadow, fitfully wavering, prophetico-satiric; no clear logical Picture. 'How 'paint to the sensual eye,' asks he once, what passes in the Holy'of-Holies of Man's Soul; in what words, known to these profane 'times, speak even afar off of the unspeakable?' We ask in turn: Why perplex these times, profane as they are, with needless obscurity, by omission and by commission? Not mystical only

is our Professor, but whimsical; and involves himself, now more than ever, in eye-bewildering chiaroscuro. Successive glimpses, here faithfully imparted, our more gifted readers must endeavour to combine for their own behoof.

He says: 'The hot Harmattan-wind had raged itself out: its 'howl went silent within me; and the long-deafened soul could 'now hear. I paused in my wild wanderings; and sat me down 'to wait, and consider; for it was as if the hour of change drew 'nigh. I seemed to surrender, to renounce utterly, and say: 'Fly, then, false shadows of Hope; I will chase you no more, I 'will believe you no more. And ye too haggard spectres of Fear, 'I care not for you; ye too are all shadows and a lie. Let me 'rest here: for I am way-weary and life weary; I will rest here, were it but to die: to die or to live is alike to me; alike insig'nificant.'—And again: 'Here, then, as I lay in that CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE; cast, doubtless by benignant upper Influence, in'to a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and 'I awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth. The first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self (Sebst-tödtung), had been 'happily accomplished; and my minds' eyes were now unsealed, ' and its hands ungyved.'

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Might we not also conjecture that the following passage refers to his Locality, during this same healing sleep;' that his Pilgrim-staff lies cast aside here on 'the high table-land;' and indeed that the repose is already taking wholesome effect on him? If it were not that the tone, in some parts, has more of riancy, even of levity, than we could have expected! However, in Teufelsdröckh, there is always the strangest Dualism: light dancing, with guitar-music, will be going on in the fore-court, while by fits from within comes the faint whimpering of woe and wail. We transcribe the piece entire :

'Beautiful it was to sit there, as in my skyey Tent, musing and 'meditating; on the high table-land, in front of the Mountains; over me, as roof, the azure Dome, and around me, for walls, four azure flowing curtains,—namely, of the Four azure Winds, on 'whose bottom-fringes also I have seen gilding. And then to 'fancy the fair Castles, that stood sheltered in these Mountain 'hollows; with their green flower lawns, and white dames and

'damosels, lovely enough: or better still, the straw-roofed Cot'tages, wherein stood many a Mother baking bread, with her chil'dren round her :-all hidden and protectingly folded up in the 'valley-folds; yet there and alive, as sure as if I beheld them. 'Or to see, as well as fancy, the nine Towns and Villages, that 'lay round my mountain-seat, which in still weather, were wont 'to speak to me (by their steeple-bells) with metal tongue; and, in almost all weather, proclaimed their vitality by repeated 'Smoke-clouds; whereon, as on a culinary horologe, I might read 'the hour of the day. For it was the smoke of cookery, as kind 'housewives at morning, midday, eventide, were boiling their hus'bands' kettles; and ever a blue pillar rose up into the air, succes'sively or simultaneously, from each of the nine, saying, as plain'ly as smoke could say: Such and such a meal is getting ready 'here. Not uninteresting! For you have the whole Borough, 'with all its love-makings and scandal-mongeries, contentions and 'contentments, as in miniature, and could cover it all with your 'hat. If, in my wide Wayfarings, I had learned to look into the 'business of the World in its details, here perhaps was the place 'for combining it into general propositions, and deducing in'ferences therefrom.

'Often also could I see the black Tempest marching in anger through the Distance: around some Schreckhorn, as yet grim'blue, would the eddying vapour gather, and there tumultuously eddy, and flow down like a mad witch's hair; till, after a space, ' it vanished, and, in the clear sunbeam, your Schreckhorn stood smiling grim-white, for the vapour had held snow. How thou 'fermentest and elaboratest in thy great fermenting-vat and la'boratory of an Atmosphere, of a World, O Nature-Or what 'is nature? Ha! why do I not name thee GOD? Art thou not "the "Living Garment of God?" O Heavens, is it, in very 'deed, HE then that ever speaks through thee; that lives and 'loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?

'Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, 'and Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. 'Sweeter than Dayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; 'ah! like the mother's voice to her little child that strays bewil'dered, weeping, in unknown tumults; like soft streamings of