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 CharlemagneMantle, as well as in the poorest Ox-goad 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 Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-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. Wonder,' 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 infidelium.' 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 prosecute 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 widerspreading harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase 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-constables 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 therewith, though the sun is shining, and the whole 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 Societies, and carried the whole Mécanique Céleste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all Labora'tories and Observatories with their results, in his single ' head,—is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is 'no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him,

I 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 to laughter; whoso recognises the unfathomable, all-pervading 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 Castle-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 disembellished 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 predicted 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 Hell-on-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, allcomprehending, all-confounding are his views and glances. For example, this of Nature being not an Aggregate but a Whole:

'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 thyself, 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 motion'less ? 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 (nachtende) moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost horseshoe,—is it a detached, separated speck, cut-off from the whole Universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole ? 'Thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the 'Sun; is fed by air that circulates from before Noah's 'Deluge, from beyond the Dogstar; therein, with Iron Force, and Coal Force, and the far stranger Force of Man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of Force ́ brought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, ' in the great vital system of Immensity. Call it, if thou 'wilt, an unconscious Altar, kindled on the bosom of the 'All; whose iron sacrifice, whose iron smoke and influence reach quite through the All; whose dingy Priest, not by ' word, yet by brain and sinew, preaches forth the mystery of Force; nay preaches forth (exoterically enough) one 'little textlet from the Gospel of Freedom, the Gospel of 'Man's Force, commanding, and one day to be all-com'manding.

'Detached, separated! I say there is no such separation : ' nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is 'borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action,

and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered 'leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around ' it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? 'Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or the litter from which the earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into 'Infinitude itself.'

Again, leaving that wondrous Schwarzwald Smithy-Altar, what vacant, high-sailing air-ships are these, and whither will they sail with us?

All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not 'there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want. On the other hand, all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful; the rather if, as we often see, the Hand I too aid her, and (by wool Clothes or otherwise) reveal I such even to the outward eye?

6

'Men are properly said to be clothed with Authority, 'clothed with Beauty, with Curses, and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible ' Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a 'light-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is he said also 'to be clothed with a Body.

'Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, 'it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the 'Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this 'Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her 'stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but 'Metaphors, recognised as such, or no longer recognised; 'still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colourless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures ' in the Flesh-Garment, Language, then are Metaphors