practical Corollaries are drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, each holding by the skirts of the other; but at best that of practical Reason, proceeding by large Intuition over whole systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, almost like that of Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith whispers, not without a plan. Nay we complained above, that a certain ignoble complexity, what we must call mere confusion, was also discernible. Often, also, we have to exclaim: Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience. At present it is only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at wide-enough intervals from the original Volume, and carefully collated, that we can hope to impart some outline or foreshadow of this Doctrine. Readers of any intelligence are once more invited to favour us with their most concentrated attention: let these, after intense consideration, and not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon there is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands, perhaps whole undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvas to sail thither?-As exordium to the whole, stand here the following long citation:

'With men of a speculative turn,' writes Teufelsdröckh,' there " come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder ' and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that can say "I" (das Wesen das sich Ich nennt)? 'The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into the distance; and, through the paper-hangings, and stone-walls, and thick-plied ' tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence 'sits surrounded, the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another.

'Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance; some embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little 'way. Sure enough, I am; and lately was not: but Whence ? How? Whereto? The answer lies around, written in all co'lours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in 'thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written

6

Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge 'thereof: sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense; ' but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not. 'Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but 'the Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in 'that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were 'substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most ' awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems is other than a 'dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where di'visor and dividend are both unknown? What are all your na'tional Wars, with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hatefilled Revolutions, but the Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? 'This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on Earth call 'Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they 'knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing.

'Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's 'secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your ' Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, 'words. High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words 'well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. The whole is greater than the part: 'how exceedingly true! Nature abhors a vacuum: how exceedingly 'false and calumnious! Again, Nothing can act but where it is: 'with all my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the slave of 'Words is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? But that same WHERE, with its brother 'WHEN, are from the first the master-colours of our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are painted. Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain of every climate and age, that 'the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; 'that the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the 'celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not all nations con'ceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in a universal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt 'find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise

Time; there is no Space and no Time: WE are we know not 'what ;-light-sparkles floating in the æther of Deity!

'So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thou'sandfold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own ' inward Force, the “phantasy of our Dream;" or what the EarthSpirit in Faust names it, the living visible Garment of God:

"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,

I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion !
Birth and Death,

An infinite ocean;

A seizing and giving

The fire of Living:

'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,

And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."

Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunderspeech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty units of us that have 'learned the meaning thereof?

'It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with 'these high speculations, that I first came upon the question ' of Clothes. Strange enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of ' there being Tailors and Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own 'whole fell: strip him of the girths and flaps and extraneous tags 'I have fastened round him, and the noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner: nay his own bootmaker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the valleys, with a perennial rainproof court-suit on his body; wherein warmth ' and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of colour, featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not want'ing. While I—good Heaven!—have thatched myself over with 'the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of 'worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and 'walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and 'tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would 'have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must 'thatch myself anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed away by 'tear and wear, must be brushed-off into the Ashpit, into the Lay'stall; till by degrees the whole has been brushed thither, and I, 'the dust-making, patent Rag-grinder, get new material to grind 'down. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I too a compact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass of tailors' and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly-articu'lated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?

D

Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But 'indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much 'readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, 'which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use'and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and 'it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped, ' of any country or generation, be he gold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one ' and indivisible; that he is naked, without vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew and button them.

For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, ' and how, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorises and demoralises us, fill me with a certain horror at myself

' and mankind; almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season, you see grazing deliberately with jackets and petticoats (of striped sacking), in the meadows of Gouda. 'Nevertheless there is something great in the moment when a man 'first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and sees indeed 'that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, " a forked straddling ani'mal with bandy legs;" yet also a Spirit, and unutterable Mystery ' of Mysteries.'

CHAPTER IX.

ADAMITISM.

LET no courteous reader take offence at the opinions broached in the conclusion of the last Chapter. The Editor himself, on first glancing over that singular passage, was inclined to exclaim: What, have we got not only a Sansculottist, but an enemy to Clothes in the abstract? A new Adamite, in this century, which flatters itself that it is the Nineteenth, and destructive both to Superstition and Enthusiasm ?

Consider, thou foolish Teufelsdröckh, what benefits unspeakable all ages and sexes derive from Clothes. For example, when thou thyself, a watery, pulpy, slobbery freshman and new-comer in this Planet, sattest muling and puking in thy nurse's arms; sucking thy coral, and looking forth into the world in the blankest manner, what hadst thou been, without thy blankets, and bibs, and

other nameless hulls? A terror to thyself and mankind! Or hast thou forgotten the day when thou first receivedst breeches, and thy long clothes became short? The village where thou livedst was all apprised of the fact; and neighbour after neighbour kissed thy pudding-cheek, and gave thee, as handsel, silver or copper coins, on that the first gala-day of thy existence. Again, wert not thou, at one period of life, a Buck, or Blood, or Macaroni, or Incroyable, or Dandy, or by whatever name, according to year and place, such phenomenon is distinguished? In that one word lie included mysterious volumes. Nay, now when the reign of folly is over, or altered, and thy clothes are not for triumph but for defence, hast thou always worn them perforce, and as a consequence of Man's Fall; never rejoiced in them as in a warm movable House, a Body round thy Body, wherein that strange THEE of thine sat snug, defying all variations of Climate? Girt with thick double-milled kerseys; half-buried under shawls and broadbrims, and overalls and mudboots, thy very fingers cased in doeskin and mittens, thou hast bestrode that Horse I ride;' and, though it were in wild winter, dashed through the world, glorying in it as if thou wert its lord. In vain did the sleet beat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable, felted or woven, case of wool. In vain did the winds howl,-forests sounding and creaking, deep calling unto deep, and the storms heap themselves together into one huge Arctic whirlpool: thou flewest through the middle thereof, striking fire from the highway; wild music hummed in thy ears, thou too wert as a 'sailor of the air;' the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds was thy element and propitiously wafting tide. Without Clothes, without bit or saddle, what hadst thou been; what had thy fleet quadruped been?-Nature is good, but she is not the best: here truly was the victory of Art over Nature. A thunderbolt indeed might have pierced thee; all short of this thou couldst defy.

Or, cries the courteous reader, has your Teufelsdröckh forgotten what he said lately about 'Aboriginal Savages,' and their condition miserable indeed?' Would he have all this unsaid; and us betake ourselves again to the matted cloak,' and go sheeted in a 'thick natural fell?'

Nowise, courteous reader! The Professor knows full well what he is saying; and both thou and we, in our haste, do him wrong. If Clothes, in these times, ' so tailorise and demoralise us,' have they no redeeming value; can they not be altered to serve better; must they of necessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdröckh, though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to go forth before this degenerate age ‘as a