Of Professor Teufelsdrockh, it seems impossible to take leave without a mingled feeling of astonishment, gratitude, and disapproval.  Who will not regret that talents, which might have profited in the higher walks of Philosophy, or in Art itself, have been so much devoted to a rummaging among lumber-rooms; nay too often to a scraping in kennels, where lost rings and diamond-necklaces are nowise the sole conquests?  Regret is unavoidable; yet censure were loss of time.  To cure him of his mad humors British Criticism would essay in vain:  enough for her if she can, by vigilance, prevent the spreading of such among ourselves.  What a result, should this piebald, entangled, hyper-metaphorical style of writing, not to say of thinking, become general among our Literary men!  As it might so easily do.  Thus has not the Editor himself, working over Teufelsdrockh’s German, lost much of his own English purity?  Even as the smaller whirlpool is sucked into the larger, and made to whirl along with it, so has the lesser mind, in this instance, been forced to become portion of the greater, and, like it, see all things figuratively:  which habit time and assiduous effort will be needed to eradicate.

Nevertheless, wayward as our Professor shows himself, is there any reader that can part with him in declared enmity?  Let us confess, there is that in the wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting man, which almost attaches us.  His attitude, we will hope and believe, is that of a man who had said to Cant, Begone; and to Dilettantism, Here thou canst not be; and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me:  a man who had manfully defied the “Time-Prince,” or Devil, to his face; nay perhaps, Hannibal-like, was mysteriously consecrated from birth to that warfare, and now stood minded to wage the same, by all weapons, in all places, at all times.  In such a cause, any soldier, were he but a Polack Scythe-man, shall be welcome.

Still the question returns on us:  How could a man occasionally of keen insight, not without keen sense of propriety, who had real Thoughts to communicate, resolve to emit them in a shape bordering so closely on the absurd?  Which question he were wiser than the present Editor who should satisfactorily answer.  Our conjecture has sometimes been, that perhaps Necessity as well as Choice was concerned in it.  Seems it not conceivable that, in a Life like our Professor’s, where so much bountifully given by Nature had in Practice failed and misgone, Literature also would never rightly prosper:  that striving with his characteristic vehemence to paint this and the other Picture, and ever without success, he at last desperately dashes his sponge, full of all colors, against the canvas, to try whether it will paint Foam?  With all his stillness, there were perhaps in Teufelsdrockh desperation enough for this.