Time itself, is well named! Which Appeal and Protest, may I now modestly add, was not perhaps quite lost in air.'

What think our readers of these short specimens of philosophy? Under all the gaiety and foreign affectations of dress as to style, does there not lurk much tenderness and truth? Our next extract, which personates the philosopher looking back on his childhood, is full of a fine strain of poetry as well as wisdom:

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 Nurseling has 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 downrushing of the universal World fabric, from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in a motionless Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling Universe is forever denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles; thou too, with old Arnauld, must say in stern patience: Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?' Celestial Nepenthe! though a Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For as yet, sleeping and waking are one: the fair Lifegarden rustles infinite around, and everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stonefruit, of which the fewest can find the kernel.""

And again,

6

"Thus encircled by the mystery of Existence; under the deep heavenly Firmament: waited on by the four golden Seasons, with their vicissitudes of contribution, for even grim Winter brought its skating-matches and shooting-matches, its snow-storms and Christmas carols,—did the Child sit and learn. These things were the Alphabet, whereby in after-time he was to syllable and partly read the grand Volume of the World; what matters it whether such Alphabet be in large gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so you have an eye to read it? For Gueschen, eager to learn, the very act of looking thereon was a blessedness that gilded all his existence was a bright, soft element of Joy; out of which, as in Prospero's Island, wonder after wonder bodied itself forth, to teach by charming.

་་ ་

Nevertheless I were but a vain dreamer to say, that even then my felicity was perfect. I had, once for all, come down from Heaven into the Earth. Among the rainbow colours that glowed on my horizon, lay even

in childhood a dark ring of Care, as yet no thicker than a thread, and often quite overshone; yet always it reappeared, nay, ever waxing broader and broader; till in after-years it almost overshadowed my whole canopy, and threatened to engulf me in final night. It was the ring of Necessity, whereby we are all begirt; happy he for whom a kind heavenly Sun brightens it into a ring of Duty, and plays round it with beautiful prismatic diffractions; yet ever, as basis and as bourne for our whole being, it is there.'

66

Afterwards the autobiographer says, speaking of his schooling, My teachers were hide-bound pedants, without knowledge of man's nature or of boy's; or of aught save their lexicons and quarterly account-books." Cramming with dead vocables, they "called it fostering the growth of mind." But he indignantly asks, "How can an inanimate, mechanical, Gerund-grinder foster the growth of anything?" Mind, he declares, grows not like a vegetable, "by having its roots littered with etymological compost, but like a spirit, by mysterious compact with spirit-thought kindling itself at the fire of living thought." Gems sparkle and handfuls of gold are scattered in every page of this whimsically constructed book; but we must take long strides and miss many of them.

The young Diogenes having passed happily through childhood, and less happily yet still vigorously through boyhood, becomes a university man. But he says

"The University where I was educated still stands vivid enough in my remembrance, and I know its name well; which name, however, I, from tenderness to existing interests and persons, shall in no wise divulge. It is my painful duty to say that, ont of England and Spain, ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered Universities. This is indeed a time when right Education is, as nearly as may be, impossible: however, in degrees of wrongness there is no limit: nay, I can conceive a worse system than that of the Nameless itself; as poisoned victual may be worse than absolute hunger.'

Some pungent things are said about education, polity, and religion, the philosopher characterising the present age as the brazen one; the coming ages, the golden in regard to these branches; then he adds

666

Besides all this, we boasted ourselves a Rational University; in the highest degree, hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind furnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort must soon end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode (crepiren) in finished Self-conceit and to all spiritual intents become dead."

Diogenes is not, at the time alluded to in his career, void of spiritual pride. Indeed in the course of his life he has to pace the mental ladder, from "The Everlasting No," to the "Centre of Indif

ference," and thence to "The Everlasting Yea." The chapter about this last stage of conviction and principle of action, appears to us to be a very remarkable one. We are mistaken if the author has not, in the two paragraphs which we are next to quote, happily pointed the way, in some of the most obscure regions of philosophy and Christian doctrine, where many have stumbled or come far short of the whole truth.

666

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 hardfought battle. 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 mandate, Eat thou and be filled, at the same time, persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve,—must there not be a confusion, 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 nought, 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 hand-writing 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 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 enchanted forests, demonpeopled, 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 summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only !'"

But to go back to an earlier period in Teufelsdröckh's history, and to some less mysterious matters than the subject of Liberty and Necessity, or the spiritual strugglings of the human soul:-he has been called to the bar, but says he," For long years had the poor Hebrew, in this Egypt of an Auscultatorship, painfully toiled, baking bricks without stubble," that is to say, he was a mere listener, not a practitioner or employed professionalist in the courts of law. Food and warmth became the subjects of inquiry and anxiety. But at this same time, when he has just resolved on becoming a rover, and to search if the needful things of life cannot

be discovered in the whole wide universe, a certain Calypso-island detains him. The philosopher, his memory and heart recurring to this period, declares that—

"In every well-conditioned stripling, as I conjecture, there already blooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve; nor in the stately vistas, and flowerage and foliage of that Garden is a Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof, wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier if Cherubim and a Flaming Sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant him, the imaginative stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestial barrier; and the sacred air-cities of Hope have not shrunk into the mean clay-hamlets of Reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free!"

But although the feelings of the briefless barrister towards the queens of the earth had been altogether unspeakable, and he believed that a visible divinity dwelt in them, yet hitherto all women were to him, it would appear, alike holy, alike heavenly. At length Blumine, the Flower-Goddess, in all her radiance comes under his gaze as the Queen of Hearts. Our former hasty outline of his life leaves it unnecessary to explain the manner of his admittance to her presence, or to her converse. Now hear the rhapsodist

"In free speech, earnest or gay, amid lambent glances, laughter, tears, and often with the inarticulate mystic speech of Music: such was the element they now lived in; in such a many tinted, radiant Aurora, and by this fairest of Orient Light-bringers must our Friend be blandished, and the new Apocalypse of Nature unrolled to him. Fairest Blumine! And, even as a Star, all Fire and humid Softness, a very Light-ray incarnate! Was there so much as a fault, a caprice,' he could have dispensed with? Was she not to him in very deed a Morning-Star; did not her presence bring with it, airs from Heaven? As from Eolean Harps in the breath of dawn, as from the Memnon's Statue struck by the rosy finger of Aurora, unearthly music was around him, and lapped him into untried balmy Rest. Pale Doubt fled away to the distance; Life bloomed up with happiness and hope. The Past, then, was all a haggard dream; he had been in the Garden of Eden, then, and could not discern it! But lo now! the black walls of his prison melt away; the captive is alive, is free. he loved his Disenchantress? Ach Gott! His whole heart and soul and life were hers, but never had he named it Love: existence was all a Feeling, not yet shaped into a Thought."

If

Such was the splendour, though, we are told, not the dominant state, of Diogenes' love-passion. What was the issue? His own pen, aided by the volunteered additions of the editor, will best inform us.

"One morning, he found his Morning-star all dimmed and duskyred; the fair creature was silent, absent, she seemed to have been weeping. Alas, no longer a Morning-star, but a troublous skiey Portent, announ

cing that the Doomsday had dawned! She said, in a tremulous voice, they were to meet no more.' The thunderstruck Air-sailor is not wanting to himself in this dread hour: but what avails it? We omit the passionate expostulations, entreaties, indignations, since all was vain, and not even an explanation was conceded him; and hasten to the catastrophe. Farewell, then, Madam! said he, not without sternness, for his stung pride helped him. She put her hand in his, she looked in his face, tears started to her eyes: in wild audacity he clasped her to his bosom; their lips were joined, their two souls, like two dew drops, rushed into one, -for the first time, and for the last!' Thus was Teufelsdröckh made immortal by a kiss. And then? Why, then-' thick curtains of Night' rushed over his soul, as rose the immeasurable Crash of Doom; and through the ruins as of a shivered Universe, was he falling, falling, towards the Abyss."

To persons with only a moderate share of philosophical acumen, or who may not yet have fully appreciated Teufelsdröckh's nature, it may appear that there was only one of three things left for him to do:

"Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his brains, In the progress towards any of which consummations, do not such readers anticipate extravagance enough: breast-beating, browbeating (against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemy and the like, stampings, smitings, breakages of furniture, if not arson itself?"

Nowise so does the philosopher deport himself; but this has already been mentioned by us; and therefore, passing from his biography, we must have a specimen of his Clothes-philosophy, the main matter of the book.

Did ever any of our readers find so much in Old Clothes, or sentimentalize so luxuriantly, when pacing Monmouth Street, as the briefless rover has done? Take a sample of his wisdom, his grotesque pedantry, if you choose to call it :

What still dignity dwells in a suit of Cast Clothes! How meekly it bears its honours! No haughty looks, no scornful gesture; silent and serene, it fronts the world; neither demanding worship, nor afraid to miss it. The Hat still carries the physiogonomy of its Head; but the vanity and the stupidity, and goose-speech which was the sign of these two, are gone. The Coat-arm is stretched out, but not to strike; the Breeches, in modest simplicity, depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; the Waistcoat hides no evil passion, no riotous desire; hunger or thirst now dwells not in it. Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense, from the carking cares and foul vices of the World; and rides there, on its Clotheshorse: as, on a Pegasus, might some skiey Messenger, or purified Apparation, visiting our low Earth,

66 6

Often, while I sojourned in that monstrous Tuberosity of Civilised Life, the Capital of England: and meditated, and questioned Destiny, under that ink-sea of vapour, black, thick, and multifarious as Spartan broth; and was one lone Soul amid those grinding millions;—often have I