e 5 '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 divisor and dividend are both unknown? What are all 10 your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the Somnam'bulism of uneasy Sleepers? This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on Earth call Life; wherein 'the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew 15 ' right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing. ९ e ९ ९ ९ ९ '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 20 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; 25 '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 30 'of Words is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, ९ ९ ९ : 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 5 'climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so myste'riously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but super'ficial 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 conceived their God as Omnipresent and 'Eternal; as existing in a universal HERE, an everlast'ing 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 15 'not what;-light-sparkles floating in the æther of 'Deity! IO So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but *an air-image, our ME the only reality and Nature, with : 'its thousandfold production and destruction, but the 20 'reflex of our own inward Force, the "phantasy of our 'Dream"; or what the Earth-Spirit in Faust names it, 'the living visible Garment of God. 25 30 "In Being's floods, in Action's storm, I walk and work, above, beneath, Work and weave in endless motion ! 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 'thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty ' units of us that have learned the meaning thereof? 5 '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 10 '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 wanting. 'While I good Heaven! - have thatched myself over 15 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 20 '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 brushedoff into the Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees 25 '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, 30 'then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, ' automatic, nay alive? Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut 'their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of ર '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, 5 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 10 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 fore15 thought 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 20 '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. Never'theless there is something great in the moment when a 'man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and 25 sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, "a 'forked straddling animal 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 5 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. 10 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 15 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 apprized of the fact; and neighbour after neighbour kissed thy 20 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 phe- 25 nomenon 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 30 |