Of one fool, however, the Herr Professor will perhaps find himself short.  On a small slip, formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink being all but invisible, we lately noticed, and with effort decipher, the following:  “What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical?  Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Mankind, by stringing together bead-rolls of what thou namest Facts?  The Man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he became.  Facts are engraved Hierograms, for which the fewest have the key.  And then how your Blockhead (Dummkopf) studies not their Meaning; but simply whether they are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral!  Still worse is it with your Bungler (Pfuscher):  such I have seen reading some Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking the ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous reptile.”  Was the Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts himself, might mistake the Teufelsdrockh Serpent-of-Eternity in like manner?  For which reason it was to be altered, not without underhand satire, into a plainer Symbol?  Or is this merely one of his half-sophisms, half-truisms, which if he can but set on the back of a Figure, he cares not whither it gallop?  We say not with certainty; and indeed, so strange is the Professor, can never say.  If our suspicion be wholly unfounded, let his own questionable ways, not our necessary circumspectness bear the blame.

But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhausted Editor determines here to shut these Paper-bags for the present.  Let it suffice that we know of Teufelsdrockh, so far, if “not what he did, yet what he became:”  the rather, as his character has now taken its ultimate bent, and no new revolution, of importance, is to be looked for.  The imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche:  and such, wheresoever be its flight, it will continue.  To trace by what complex gyrations (flights or involuntary waftings) through the mere external Life-element, Teufelsdrockh, reaches his University Professorship, and the Psyche clothes herself in civic Titles, without altering her now fixed nature,—­would be comparatively an unproductive task, were we even unsuspicious of its being, for us at least, a false and impossible one.  His outward Biography, therefore, which, at the Blumine Lover’s-Leap, we saw churned utterly into spray-vapor, may hover in that condition, for aught that concerns us here.  Enough that by survey of certain “pools and plashes,” we have ascertained its general direction; do we not already know that, by one way and other, it has long since rained down again into a stream; and even now, at Weissnichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with the Philosophy of Clothes, and visible to whoso will cast eye thereon?  Over much invaluable matter, that lies scattered, like jewels among quarry-rubbish, in those Paper-catacombs, we may have occasion to glance back, and somewhat will demand insertion at the right place:  meanwhile be our tiresome diggings therein suspended.