'brown men, all clear-washed, loud-laughing, bedizened ' and beribanded; who came for dancing, for treating, ' and if possible, for happiness. Topbooted Graziers 'from the North; Swiss Brokers, Italian Drovers, also 'topbooted, from the South; these with their subalterns 5 ' in leather jerkins, leather skull-caps, and long oxgoads; 'shouting in half-articulate speech, amid the inarticulate 'barking and bellowing. Apart stood Potters from far Saxony, with their crockery in fair rows; Nürnberg 'Pedlars, in booths that to me seemed richer than Ormuz 10 'bazaars; Showmen from the Lago Maggiore; detachments of the Wiener Schub (Offscourings of Vienna) ' vociferously superintending games of chance. Ballad'singers brayed, Auctioneers grew hoarse; cheap New 'Wine (heuriger) flowed like water, still worse confound- 15 'ing the confusion; and high over all, vaulted, in groundand-lofty tumbling, a particoloured Merry-Andrew, like the genius of the place and of Life itself.'

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'Thus encircled by the mystery of Existence; under 'the deep heavenly Firmament; waited-on by the four 20 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 25 'partly read the grand Volume of the World: what mat

ters it whether such Alphabet be in large gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so you have an eye to read it? *For Gneschen, eager to learn, the very act of looking

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thereon was a blessedness that gilded all: his existence 30 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.

rainbow colours that glowed on my horizon, lay even in

5 * childhood a dark ring of Care, as yet no thicker than a

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thread, and often quite overshone; yet always it reappeared, nay ever waxing broader and broader; till in after-years it almost over-shadowed my whole canopy,

' and threatened to engulf me in final night.

It was IO 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 pris'matic diffractions; yet ever, as basis and as bourne for our whole being, it is there.

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For the first few years of our terrestrial Apprentice'ship, we have not much work to do; but, boarded and 'lodged gratis, are set down mostly to look about us over 'the workshop, and see others work, till we have under'stood the tools a little, and can handle this and that. 20 'If good Passivity alone, and not good Passivity and good Activity together, were the thing wanted, then was

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my early position favourable beyond the most. In all 'that respects openness of Sense, affectionate Temper, ingenuous Curiosity, and the fostering of these, what 25' more could I have wished? On the other side, however, things went not so well. My Active Power (Thatkraft) was unfavourably hemmed-in; of which misfortune how many traces yet abide with me! In an orderly 'house, where the litter of children's sports is hateful 30 enough, your training is too stoical; rather to bear and 'forbear than to make and do. I was forbid much : 'wishes in any measure bold I had to renounce; every'where a strait bond of Obedience inflexibly held me 'down. Thus already Freewill often came in painful

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collision with Necessity; so that my tears flowed, and at seasons the Child itself might taste that root of bit'terness, wherewith the whole fruitage of our life is mingled and tempered.

In which habituation to Obedience, truly, it was be- 5 'yond measure safer to err by excess than by defect. 'Obedience is our universal duty and destiny; wherein 'whoso will not bend must break: too early and too 'thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, ' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to Should, and for 10 most part as the smallest of fractions even to Shall. 'Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldly Discretion, 'nay, of Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my up'bringing! It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively 'secluded, every way unscientific: yet in that very strict- 15 ness and domestic solitude might there not lie the root

of deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble 'fruit must grow? Above all, how unskilful soever, it 'was loving, it was well-meant, honest; whereby every deficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I 20 must ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether 'invaluable service: she taught me, less indeed by word 'than by act and daily reverent look and habitude, her 'own simple version of the Christian Faith. Andreas 'too attended Church; yet more like a parade duty for 25 'which he in the other world expected pay with arrears,

– as, I trust, he has received; but my Mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the Good grows, and propagates itself, even 30 among the weedy entanglements of Evil! The highest 'whom I knew on Earth I here saw bowed down, with 'awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven: such 'things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very

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core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies 'build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the divinest in man, springs forth undying 'from its mean envelopment of Fear. Wouldst thou rather be a peasant's son that knew, were it never so rudely, there was a God in Heaven and in Man; or a 'duke's son that only knew there were two-and-thirty quarters on the family-coach?'.

To which last question we must answer: Beware, O 10 Teufelsdröckh, of spiritual pride!

CHAPTER III.

PEDAGOGY.

HITHERTO We see young Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellow serge, borne forward mostly on the arms of kind Nature alone; seated, indeed, and much to his mind, in the terrestrial workshop; but (except his soft 15 hazel eyes, which we doubt not already gleamed with a still intelligence) called upon for little voluntary movement there. Hitherto, accordingly, his aspect is rather generic, that of an incipient Philosopher and Poet in the abstract perhaps it would puzzle Herr Heuschrecke 20 himself to say wherein the Special Doctrine of Clothes is as yet foreshadowed or betokened. For with Gneschen, as with others, the Man may indeed stand pictured in the Boy (at least all the pigments are there); yet only some half of the Man stands in the Child, or young Boy, 25 namely, his Passive endowment, not his Active. The more impatient are we to discover what figure he cuts in this latter capacity; how, when, to use his own words,

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he understands the tools a little, and can handle this or that,' he will proceed to handle it.

Here, however, may be the place to state that, in much of our Philosopher's history, there is something of an almost Hindoo character: nay, perhaps in that so well 5 fostered and everyway excellent 'Passivity' of his, which, with no free development of the antagonist Activity, distinguished his childhood, we may detect the rudiments of much that, in after-days, and still in these present days, astonishes the world. For the shallow-sighted, 10 Teufelsdröckh is oftenest a man without Activity of any kind, a No-man; for the deep-sighted, again, a man with Activity almost superabundant, yet so spiritual, closehidden, enigmatic, that no mortal can foresee its explosions, or even when it has exploded, so much as ascertain 15 its significance. A dangerous, difficult temper for the modern European; above all, disadvantageous in the hero of a Biography! Now as heretofore it will behove the Editor of these pages, were it never so unsuccessfully, to do his endeavour.

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Among the earliest tools of any complicacy which a man, especially a man of letters, gets to handle, are his Class-books. On this portion of his History, Teufelsdröckh looks down professedly as indifferent. Reading he cannot remember ever to have learned'; so perhaps 25 had it by nature. He says generally: Of the insignifi'cant portion of my Education, which depended on 'Schools, there need almost no notice be taken. I 'learned what others learn; and kept it stored-by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet no manner of use in it. 30 'My Schoolmaster, a downbent, brokenhearted, under'foot martyr, as others of that guild are, did little for me, 'except discover that he could do little: he, good soul, 'pronounced me a genius, fit for the learned professions;