“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 giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:—­and then the Heaven-sent 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 grandeur, 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 levelled, 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!’”

CHAPTER IX.  CIRCUMSPECTIVE.

Here, then, arises the so momentous question:  Have many British Readers actually arrived with us at the new promised country; is the Philosophy of Clothes now at last opening around them?  Long and adventurous has the journey been:  from those outmost vulgar, palpable Woollen Hulls of Man; through his wondrous Flesh-Garments, and his wondrous Social Garnitures; inwards to the Garments of his very Soul’s Soul, to Time and Space themselves!  And now does the spiritual, eternal Essence of Man, and of Mankind, bared of such wrappages, begin in any measure to reveal itself?  Can many readers discern, as through a glass darkly, in huge wavering outlines, some primeval rudiments of Man’s Being, what is changeable divided from what is unchangeable?  Does that Earth-Spirit’s speech in Faust,—­

     “’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
     And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by; "

or that other thousand-times repeated speech of the Magician, Shakespeare,—­

     “And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
     The cloud-capt Towers, the gorgeous Palaces,
     The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself,
     And all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
     And like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
     Leave not a wrack behind;”

begin to have some meaning for us?  In a word, do we at length stand safe in the far region of Poetic Creation and Palingenesia, where that Phoenix Death-Birth of Human Society, and of all Human Things, appears possible, is seen to be inevitable?