“To all these natural questions the voice of public History is as yet silent.  Certain only that he has been, and is, a Pilgrim, and Traveller from a far Country; more or less footsore and travel-soiled; has parted with road-companions; fallen among thieves, been poisoned by bad cookery, blistered with bug-bites; nevertheless, at every stage (for they have let him pass), has had the Bill to discharge.  But the whole particulars of his Route, his Weather-observations, the picturesque Sketches he took, though all regularly jotted down (in indelible sympathetic-ink by an invisible interior Penman), are these nowhere forthcoming?  Perhaps quite lost:  one other leaf of that mighty Volume (of human Memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted, unpublished, unbound up, as waste paper; and to rot, the sport of rainy winds?

“No, verehrtester Herr Herausgeber, in no wise!  I here, by the unexampled favor you stand in with our Sage, send not a Biography only, but an Autobiography:  at least the materials for such; wherefrom, if I misreckon not, your perspicacity will draw fullest insight:  and so the whole Philosophy and Philosopher of Clothes will stand clear to the wondering eyes of England, nay thence, through America, through Hindostan, and the antipodal New Holland, finally conquer (einnehmen) great part of this terrestrial Planet!”

And now let the sympathizing reader judge of our feeling when, in place of this same Autobiography with “fullest insight,” we find—­Six considerable PAPER-BAGS, carefully sealed, and marked successively, in gilt China-ink, with the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal Signs, beginning at Libra; in the inside of which sealed Bags lie miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips, written in Professor Teufelsdrockh’s scarce legible cursiv-schrift; and treating of all imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it, but of his own personal history only at rare intervals, and then in the most enigmatic manner.

Whole fascicles there are, wherein the Professor, or, as he here, speaking in the third person, calls himself, “the Wanderer,” is not once named.  Then again, amidst what seems to be a Metaphysico-theological Disquisition, “Detached Thoughts on the Steam-engine,” or, “The continued Possibility of Prophecy,” we shall meet with some quite private, not unimportant Biographical fact.  On certain sheets stand Dreams, authentic or not, while the circumjacent waking Actions are omitted.  Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, fly loosely on separate slips, like Sibylline leaves.  Interspersed also are long purely Autobiographical delineations; yet without connection, without recognizable coherence; so unimportant, so superfluously minute, they almost remind us of “P.P.  Clerk of this Parish.”  Thus does famine of intelligence alternate with waste.  Selection, order, appears to be unknown to the Professor.  In all Bags the same imbroglio; only perhaps in the Bag Capricorn, and those near it, the confusion a little worse confounded.  Close by a rather eloquent Oration, “On receiving the Doctor’s-Hat,” lie wash-bills, marked bezahlt (settled).  His Travels are indicated by the Street-Advertisements of the various cities he has visited; of which Street-Advertisements, in most living tongues, here is perhaps the completest collection extant.