over which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and final:

'Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kan'garoo? Or how, without Clothes, could we possess the masterเ organ, soul's-seat, and true pineal gland of the Body Social: I 'mean, a PURSE?'

Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdröckh; at worst, one knows not whether to hate or to love him. For though in looking at the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference, which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers, there is that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdröckh is, that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism, no less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he degrade man below most animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the gods.

6

'To the eye of vulgar Logic,' says he, 'what is man? An 'omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure 'Reason what is he? A soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition. 'Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under all those wool-rags, 'a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with 'them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for him'self a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands 'of Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid 'Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed in, and in'extricably overshrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a 'God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in 'the conflux of Eternities? He feels; power has been given him 'to know, to believe; nay does not the spirit of Love, free in its 'celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments,

!

'look through? Well said Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of 'gold, "the true SHEKINAH is Man :" where else is the GOD'S'PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, 'as in our fellow man?'

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood; and, through all the vapour and tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment, we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love;-though, alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from view.

Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in this man; and indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings: thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as well as in the poorest Oxgoad and Gipsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright ?' Under which point of view the following passage, so strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:

'The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or ' even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent. "The 'Philosopher," says the wisest of this age, "must station himself ' in the middle:" how true! The Philosopher is he to whom the 'Highest has descended, and the Lowest has mounted up; who 'is the equal and kindly brother of all.

'Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether 'woven in Arkwright looms, or by the silent Arachnes that weave 'unrestingly in our Imagination? Or, on the other hand, what 'is there that we cannot love; since all was created by God? Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the 'woollen, and fleshly, and official Bank-paper, and State-paper

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'Clothes), into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this " or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Diges'tive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the 'meanest Tinker that sees with eyes!'

For the rest, as is natural to a man of this kind, he deals much in the feeling of Wonder; insists on the necessity and high worth of universal Wonder; which he holds to be the only reasonable temper for the denizen of so singular a Planet as ours. 'Won'der,' says he, 'is the basis of Worship: the reign of wonder is 'perennial, indestructible in Man; only at certain stages (as the 'present), it is, for some short season, a reign in partibus infide'lium.' That progress of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small favour with Teufelsdröckh, much as he otherwise venerates these two latter processes.

'Shall your Science,' exclaims he, 'proceed in the small chink'lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; 'and man's mind become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is 'the Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, 'and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are the Meal? 'And what is that Science, which the scientific head alone, were 'it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's in the Arabian Tale) set ' in a basin, to keep it alive, could persecute without shadow of a 'heart,—but one other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts, 'for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too noble 'an organ? I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, 'perhaps poisonous; at best, dies like cookery with the day that 'called it forth; does not live, like sowing, in successive tilths 'and wider-spreading harvests, bringing food and plenteous in'crease to all Time.'

In such wise does Teufelsdröckh deal hits, harder or softer, according to ability; yet ever, as we would fain persuade ourselves, with charitable intent. Above all, that class of 'Logic'choppers, and treble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to 'Wonder; who, in these days, so numerously patrol as night-con'stables about the Mechanics' Institute of Science, and cackle, 'like true Old-Roman geese and goslings round their Capitol, on 'any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illuminated Sceptics.

'walk abroad into peaceable society, in full daylight, with rattle ' and lantern, and insist on guiding you and guarding you there'with, though the Sun is shining, and the street populous with 'mere justice-loving men' that whole class is inexpressibly wearisome to him. Hear with what uncommon animation he perorates:

'The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder '(and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal So'cieties, and carried the whole Mécanique Céleste and Hegel's Phi'losophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories 'with their results, in his single head,-is but a Pair of Spec'tacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes

'look through him, then he may be useful.

Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through ( thy world by the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even 'by the hand-lamp of what I call Attorney-Logic; and "explain" 'all, "account" for all, or believe nothing of it? Nay, thou wilt 'attempt laughter; whoso recognizes the unfathomable, all-per'vading domain of Mystery, which is everywhere under our feet ' and among our hands; to whom the Universe is an Oracle and 'Temple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattle-stall, he shall be a 'delirious Mystic; to him thou, with sniffing charity, wilt protrusively proffer thy hand-lamp, and shriek, as one injured, 'when he kicks his foot through it?-Armer Teufel! Doth not 'thy cow calve, doth not thy bull gender? Thou thyself, wert 'thou not born, wilt thou not die? "Explain" me all this, 'or do one of two things: Retire into private places with thy 'foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not 'that the reign of wonder is done, and God's world all disembel'lished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and 'sandblind Pedant.'

CHAPTER XI.

PROSPECTIVE.

THE Philosophy of Clothes is now to all readers, as we predicated it would do, unfolding itself into new boundless expansions, of a cloudcapt, almost chimerical aspect, yet not without azure loomings in the far distance, and streaks as of an Elysian brightness; the highly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming more and more important for us to ascertain. Is that a real Elysian brightness, cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex of Pandemonian lava? Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of a Hellon-Earth?

Our Professor, like other Mystics, whether delirious or inspired, gives an Editor enough to do. Ever higher and dizzier are the heights he leads us to; more piercing, all-comprehending, all-confounding are his views and glances. For example, this of Nature being not an Aggregate but a Whole:

6 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 Northwind, 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 (nach'tende) moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and