'began to fashion itself in me; wondrous enough, now when I 'look back on it; for my whole Universe, physical and spiritual, was as yet a Machine! However, such a conscious, recognized 'groundplan, the truest I had, was beginning to be there, and by 'additional experiments, might be corrected and indefinitely ' extended.'

Thus from poverty does the strong educe nobler wealth; thus in the destitution of the wild desert, does our young Ishmael acquire for himself the highest of all possessions, that of Self-help. Nevertheless a desert this was, waste, and howling with savage monsters. Teufelsdröckh gives us long details of his 'fever-paroxysms of Doubt;' his Inquiries concerning Miracles, and the Evidences of religious Faith; and how 'in the silent night'watches, still darker in his heart than over sky and earth, he 'has cast himself before the All-seeing, and with audible prayers, 'cried vehemently for Light, for deliverance from Death and the 'Grave. Not till after long years, and unspeakable agonies, did 'the believing heart surrender; sink into spell-bound sleep, 'under the nightmare, Unbelief; and, in this hag-ridden dream, 'mistake God's fair living world for a pallid, vacant Hades and 'extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain,' continues he, 'it is appointed us to pass; first must the dead 'Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into 'dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this its charnel'house, is to arise on us, newborn of Heaven, and with new heal'ing under its wings.'

To which Purgatory pains, seemingly severe enough, if we add a liberal measure of Earthly distresses, want of practical guidance, want of sympathy, want of money, want of hope; and all this in the fervid season of youth, so exaggerated in imagining, so boundless in desires, yet here so poor in means,-do we not see a strong incipient spirit oppressed and overloaded from without and from within; the fire of genius struggling up among fuelwood of the greenest, and as yet with more of bitter vapour than of clear flame.

From various fragments of Letters and other documentary scraps, it is to be inferred that Teufelsdröckh, isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not altogether escaped notice: certain

established men are aware of his existence; and, if stretching out no helpful hand, have at least their eyes upon him. He appears, though in dreary enough humour, to be addressing himself to the Profession of Law;-whereof, indeed, the world has since seen him a public graduate. But omitting these broken, unsatisfactory thrums of Economical relation, let us present rather the following small thread of Moral relation; and therewith, the reader for himself weaving it in at the right place, conclude our dim arras picture of these University years.

6

'Here also it was that I formed acquaintance with Herr Tow'good, or, as it is perhaps better written, Herr Toughgut; a 'young person of quality (von Adel), from the interior parts of England. He stood connected, by blood and hospitality, with 'the Counts von Zähdarm, in this quarter of Germany; to which 'noble Family I likewise was, by his means, with all friendliness, 'brought near. Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably ill-culti'vated; with considerable humour of character: and, bating his 'total ignorance, for he knew nothing except Boxing and a little Grammar, shewed less of that aristocratic impassivity, and silent fury, than for most part belongs to Travellers of his nation. To him I owe my first practical knowledge of the English and 'their ways; perhaps also something of the partiality with which 'I have ever since regarded that singular people. Towgood was 'not without an eye, could he have come at any light. Invited 'doubtless by the presence of the Zähdarm Family, he had tra‘velled hither, in the almost frantic hope of perfecting his studies; 'he, whose studies had as yet been those of infancy, hither to a 'University where so much as the notion of perfection, not to say 'the effort after it, no longer existed! Often we would condole over the hard destiny of the Young in this era: how, after all our toil, we were to be turned out into the world, with beards on 'our chins indeed, but with few other attributes of manhood; no 'existing thing that we were trained to Act on, nothing that we 'could so much as Believe. "How has our head on the outside a polished Hat," would Towgood exclaim, "and in the inside Vacancy, or a froth of Vocables and Attorney Logic! At a 'small cost men are educated to make leather into shoes; but at 'a great cost, what am I educated to make? By Heaven, Bro

'ther! what I have already eaten and worn, as I came thus far, 'would endow a considerable Hospital of Incurables.”—“ Man, ‘indeed,” I would answer, "has a Digestive Faculty, which must 'be kept working, were it even partly by stealth. But as for our 'Miseducation, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet 'ours, in trampling on thistles because they have yielded us no 'figs. Frisch zu Bruder! Here are Books, and we have brains 'to read them; here is a whole Earth and a whole Heaven, and we have eyes to look on them: Frisch zu!"

'Often also our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even 'fire. We looked out on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where 'all at once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quar'tered: motley, not unterrific was the aspect; but we looked on 'it like brave youths. For myself, these were perhaps my most 'genial hours. Towards this young warmhearted, strongheaded 'and wrongheaded Herr Towgood, I was even near experiencing 'the now obsolete sentiment of Friendship. Yes, foolish Heathen 'that I was, I felt that, under certain conditions, I could have 'loved this man, and taken him to my bosom, and been his bro'ther once and always. By degrees, however, I understood the 'new time, and its wants. If man's Soul is indeed, as in the Fin'nish Language, and Utilitarian Philosophy, a kind of Stomach, 'what else is the true meaning of Spiritual Union but an Eating 'together? Thus we, instead of Friends, are Dinner-guests; and 'here as elsewhere have cast away chimeras.'

So ends, abruptly as is usual, and enigmatically, this little incipient romance. What henceforth becomes of the brave Herr Towgood, or Toughgut? He has dived under, in the Autobiographical Chaos, and swims we see not where. Does any reader ' in the interior parts of England' know of such a man ?

CHAPTER IV.

GETTING UNDER WAY.

THUS nevertheless,' writes our Autobiographer, apparently as quitting College, 'was there realised Somewhat; namely, I, 'Diogenes Teufelsdröckh: a visible Temporary Figure (Zeitbild), 'occupying some cubic feet of Space, and containing within it 'Forces both physical and spiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts; 'the whole wondrous furniture, in more or less perfection, belong'ing to that mystery, a Man. Capabilities there were in me to 'give battle, in some small degree, against the great Empire of 'Darkness: does not the very Ditcher and Delver, with his spade, 'extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little 'Order, where he found the opposite? Nay your very Daymoth 'has capabilities in this kind; and ever organises something (into 'its own Body, if no otherwise), which was before Inorganic; and ' of mute dead air makes living music, though only of the faint'est, by humming.

Of

'How much more, one whose capabilities are spiritual; who 'has learned, or begun learning, the grand thaumaturgic art of 'Thought! Thaumaturgic I name it; for hitherto all Miracles 'have been wrought thereby, and henceforth innumerable will be 'wrought; whereof we, even in these days, witness some. 'the Poet's and Prophet's inspired Message, and how it makes ' and unmakes whole worlds, I shall forbear mention; but cannot 'the dullest hear Steam-engines clanking around him? Has he 6 not seen the Scottish Brassmith's IDEA (and this but a mechani'cal one) travelling on fire-wings round the Cape, and across two 'Oceans; and stronger than any other Enchanter's Familiar, on 'all hands unweariedly fetching and carrying: at home, not only 'weaving Cloth; but rapidly enough overturning the whole old 'system of Society; and, for Feudalism and Preservation of the

'Game, preparing us, by indirect but sure methods, Industrial'ism and the Government of the Wisest? Truly a Thinking Man 'is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every 'time such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a 'shudder through the Nether Empire; and new Emissaries are 'trained, with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and hood'wink and handcuff him.

'With such high vocation had I too, as denizen of the Uni'verse, been called. Unhappy it is, however, that though born 'to the amplest Sovereignty, in this way, with no less than sove'reign right of Peace and War against the Time-Prince (Zeit'furst), or Devil, and all his Dominions, your coronation ceremony 'costs such trouble, your sceptre is so difficult to get at, or even 'to get eye on!'

By which last wiredrawn similitude, does Teufelsdröckh mean no more than that young men find obstacles in what we call 'get'ting under way ?? 'Not what I Have,' continues he, 'but what 'I Do is my Kingdom. To each is given a certain inward Tal'ent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each, by 'wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of Capa'bility. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find 'by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your 'combined inward and outward Capability specially is. For, 'alas, our young soul is all budding with Capabilities, and we sce 'not yet which is the main and true one. Always too the new 'man is in a new time, under new conditions; his course can be 'the fac-simile of no prior one, but is by its nature original. And 'then how seldom will the outward Capabilitiy fit the inward : 'though talented wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriendly, 'dyspeptical, bashful; nay what is worse than all, we are foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of Capabilities, we go stupidly grop'ing about, to grope which is ours, and often clutch the wrong one in this mad work, must several years of our small term be 'spent, till the purblind Youth, by practice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing Man. Nay, many so spend their 'whole term, and in ever-new expectation, ever-new disappoint'ment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side: