Such a fire of romance did actually burst forth in Herr Diogenes. We know not who "Blumine" was, nor how they met. She was young, hazel-eyed, beautiful, high-born, and of high spirit, but unhappily dependent and insolvent, living perhaps on the bounty of moneyed relatives. "To our friend the hours seemed moments; holy was he and happy; the words from those sweetest lips came over him like dew on thirsty grass. At parting, the Blumine's hand was in his; in the balmy twilight, with the kind stars above them, he spoke something of meeting again, which was not contradicted; he pressed gently those soft, small fingers, and it seemed as if they were not hastily, not angrily withdrawn."
Poor Teufelsdröckh, it is clear to demonstration thou art smit! Flame-clad, thou art scaling the upper Heaven, and verging towards insanity, for prize of a high-souled brunette, as if the earth held but one and not several of these! "One morning, he found his morning-star all dimmed and dusky-red; doomsday had dawned; they were to meet no more!" Their lips were joined for the first time and the last, and Teufelsdröckh was made immortal by a kiss. And then—"thick curtains of night rushed over his soul, and he fell, through the ruins as of a shivered universe, towards the abyss."
He quietly lifts his pilgrim-staff, and begins a perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous globe. We find him in Paris, in Vienna, in Tartary, in the Sahara, flying with hunger always parallel to him, and a whole infernal chase in his rear. He traverses mountains and valleys with aimless speed, writing with footprints his sorrows, that his spirit may free herself, and he become a man. Vain truly is the hope of your swiftest runner to escape from his own shadow! We behold him, through these dim years, in a state of crisis, of transition; his aimless pilgrimings are but a mad fermentation, wherefrom, the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself.
Man has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the "Place of Hope"; yet our professor, for the present, is quite shut out from hope. As he wanders wearisomely through this world he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. "Doubt," says he, "had darkened into unbelief." It is all a grim desert, this once fair world of his; and no pillar of cloud by day, and no pillar of fire by night, any longer guides the pilgrim. "Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of enchantment, divided me from all living; was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, no, there was none! To me the universe was all void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and mill of death!
"Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French capital or suburbs, was I, one sultry dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint Thomas de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were a little cheered; when, all at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself, 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the devil and man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatever it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!' And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base fear away from me for ever. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed; not fear or whining sorrow was it, but indignation and grim fire-eyed defiance.
"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its protest. The Everlasting No had said, 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the universe is mine, the devil's'; to which my whole Me now made answer, 'I am not thine, but free, and for ever hate thee!'
"It is from this hour that I incline to date my spiritual new-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a man."
Our wanderer's unrest was for a time but increased. "Indignation and defiance are not the most peaceable inmates," yet it was no longer a quite hopeless unrest. He looked away from his own sorrows, over the many-coloured world, and few periods of his life were richer in spiritual culture than this. He had reached the Centre of Indifference wherein he had accepted his own nothingness. "I renounced utterly, I would hope no more and fear no more. To die or to live was to me alike insignificant. Here, then, as I lay in that Centre of Indifference, cast by benignant upper influence into a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and I awoke to a new heaven and a new earth. I saw that man can do without happiness and instead thereof find blessedness. Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him. In this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free! Produce! produce! Work while it is called to-day."
III.—The Volume on Clothes
In so capricious a work as this of the professor's, our course cannot be straightforward, but only leap by leap, noting significant indications here and there. Thus, "perhaps the most remarkable incident in modern history," he says, "is George Fox's making to himself a suit of leather, when, desiring meditation and devout prayer to God, he took to the woods, chose the hollow of a tree for his lodging and wild berries for his food, and for clothes stitched himself one perennial suit of leather. Then was there in broad Europe one free man, and Fox was he!"