Do our readers discern any such corner-stone, or even so much as what Teufelsdrockh, is looking at?  He exclaims, “Or hast thou forgotten Paris and Voltaire?  How the aged, withered man, though but a Sceptic, Mocker, and millinery Court-poet, yet because even he seemed the Wisest, Best, could drag mankind at his chariot-wheels, so that princes coveted a smile from him, and the loveliest of France would have laid their hair beneath his feet!  All Paris was one vast Temple of Hero-worship; though their Divinity, moreover, was of feature too apish.

“But if such things,” continues he, “were done in the dry tree, what will be done in the green?  If, in the most parched season of Man’s History, in the most parched spot of Europe, when Parisian life was at best but a scientific Hortus Siccus, bedizened with some Italian Gumflowers, such virtue could come out of it; what is to be looked for when Life again waves leafy and bloomy, and your Hero-Divinity shall have nothing apelike, but be wholly human?  Know that there is in man a quite indestructible Reverence for whatsoever holds of Heaven, or even plausibly counterfeits such holding.  Show the dullest clodpoll, show the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself is actually here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and worship.”

Organic filaments, of a more authentic sort, mysteriously spinning themselves, some will perhaps discover in the following passage:—­

“There is no Church, sayest thou?  The voice of Prophecy has gone dumb?  This is even what I dispute:  but in any case, hast thou not still Preaching enough?  A Preaching Friar settles himself in every village; and builds a pulpit, which he calls Newspaper.  Therefrom he preaches what most momentous doctrine is in him, for man’s salvation; and dost not thou listen, and believe?  Look well, thou seest everywhere a new Clergy of the Mendicant Orders, some barefooted, some almost bare-backed, fashion itself into shape, and teach and preach, zealously enough, for copper alms and the love of God.  These break in pieces the ancient idols; and, though themselves too often reprobate, as idol-breakers are wont to be, mark out the sites of new Churches, where the true God-ordained, that are to follow, may find audience, and minister.  Said I not, Before the old skin was shed, the new had formed itself beneath it?”

Perhaps also in the following; wherewith we now hasten to knit up this ravelled sleeve:—­

“But there is no Religion?” reiterates the Professor.  “Fool!  I tell thee, there is.  Hast thou well considered all that lies in this immeasurable froth-ocean we name LITERATURE?  Fragments of a genuine Church-Homiletic lie scattered there, which Time will assort:  nay fractions even of a Liturgy could I point out.  And knowest thou no Prophet, even in the vesture, environment, and dialect of this age?  None to whom the Godlike had revealed itself, through all meanest and highest forms of the Common; and by him been again prophetically revealed:  in whose inspired melody, even in these rag-gathering and rag-burning days, Man’s Life again begins, were it but afar off, to be divine?  Knowest thou none such?  I know him, and name him—­Goethe.