of Ignorance and earthly Degradation, shine through, in unspeakable Awfulness, unspeakable Beauty, on their souls:  who therefore are rightly accounted Prophets, God-possessed; or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced.  Sitting in his stall; working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had, nevertheless, a Living Spirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through which, as through a window, it could look upwards, and discern its celestial Home.  The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled even with some prospect of victuals, and an honorable Mastership in Cordwainery, and perhaps the post of Thirdborough in his hundred, as the crown of long faithful sewing,—­was nowise satisfaction enough to such a mind:  but ever amid the boring and hammering came tones from that far country, came Splendors and Terrors; for this poor Cordwainer, as we said, was a Man; and the Temple of Immensity, wherein as Man he had been sent to minister, was full of holy mystery to him.

“The Clergy of the neighborhood, the ordained Watchers and Interpreters of that same holy mystery, listened with un-affected tedium to his consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such doubts, to ’drink beer, and dance with the girls.’  Blind leaders of the blind!  For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what were their shovel-hats scooped out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons girt on; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other racketing, held over that spot of God’s Earth,—­if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality?  Fox turned from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather-parings and his Bible.  Mountains of encumbrance, higher than AEtna, had been heaped over that Spirit:  but it was a Spirit, and would not lie buried there.  Through long days and nights of silent agony, it struggled and wrestled, with a man’s force, to be free:  how its prison-mountains heaved and swayed tumultuously, as the giant spirit shook them to this hand and that, and emerged into the light of Heaven!  That Leicester shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican or Loretto-shrine.—­’So bandaged, and hampered, and hemmed in,’ groaned he, ’with thousand requisitions, obligations, straps, tatters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor move:  not my own am I, but the World’s; and Time flies fast, and Heaven is high, and Hell is deep:  Man! bethink thee, if thou hast power of Thought!  Why not; what binds me here?  Want, want!—­Ha, of what?  Will all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light?  Only Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God.  I will to the woods:  the hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild berries feed me; and for Clothes, cannot I stitch myself one perennial suit of Leather!’