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and feeble and fearful; or uproar (poltern) and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead-till the scent of the morning-air summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day?

"Where now is Alexander of Macedon? Does the steel host that yelled in fierce battle shouts, at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, as perturbed Goblins must?-Napoleon, too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now with its howling tumult, that made night hideous, flitted away?-Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once.

"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him, but are in very deed, Ghosts! These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion?-They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered around our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse fire flashes from his eyes, force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a Vision, a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance. Fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and warhorse sink beyond plummet's sounding.-Plummet's! Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago they were not; a little while and they are not; their very ashes are not.

"So has it been from the Beginning; so will it be to

the End. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission appears. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow :-and then the Heavensent is recalled, his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a Vanished Shadow.

"" Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in long drawn, quick-succeeding grandeurs, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, in our passage. Can the Earth, which is but dead and a Vision, resist Spirits, which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery; from God and to God.

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'"

It was for a manuscript full of such passages as these that there could not be found in all London a publisher who would venture to "translate it into print." And the only encouraging word, as far as we can learn, was the one publisher's

guarded assurance that "the writer required only a little more tact to produce a popular as well as an able work"; and his Reader, "a gentleman in the highest class of men of letters," had nothing better to say than that "the work displays here and there some felicity of thought and expression, considerable fancy and knowledge." It was this work that the sapient newspaper critic called “a heap of clotted nonsense." The particular sentence which he thought rather more intelligible if read backward than forward is this: "The fire-baptized soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own freedom; which feeling is its Baphometic baptism; the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battering, will doubtless by degrees be conquered and pacificated." This oracular critique was very appropriately given to the world on All-Fools Day, in the year of grace 1834. The critic was evidently one of that large class in whose behalf the day is celebrated, and it was quite in keeping that he should gravely ask, "Why can not the author lay aside his pedantry, and write so as to make himself generally intelligible?"

But "Sartor Resartus " is not merely a vehicle for the most profound transcendental speculation; it is quite as much, as Mr. Emerson phrases it, Criticism upon the Spirit of the Age-we had al

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most said of the hour in which we live; exhibiting in the most just and novel light the present aspects of Religion, Politics, and Literature." A few extracts must be given in verification of this statement. As this, which is Teufelsdröckh's view, taken from his room high up in the attic of the highest house in Weissnichtwo, of

THE ASPECTS OF LIFE IN A GREAT CITY.

“Ach, mein Lieber," said he once, at midnight, when he had returned from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk. "It is a true sublimity to dwell here. The fringes of lamplight struggling through smoke and thousand-fold exhalations, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting Dogs over the Zenith, in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are leading her to halls roofed in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl and moan like nightbirds, are abroad: that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of Sick Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors and putrefactions and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there; men are being born; men are praying; on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and all around them is the vast, void Night.

"The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains. Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken

into its lair of straw. In obscure cellars Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard hungry Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are men. The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the Borders: the Thief, still more silently, sets to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and music, and high-swelling hearts; but in the Condemned Cells the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint; and bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow: Comes no hammering from the Rabenstein? their gallows must even now be o'building.

"Upward of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie around us, in horizontal position; their heads all in night-caps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten. All these, heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them; crammed like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed Vipers, each struggling to get his head above the other. Such work goes on under that smoke-counterpane!—But I, mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars."

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Bearing in mind that "Sartor Resartus is ostensibly, in part, a review of Professor Teufels

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