“The little green veil,” adds he, among much similar moralizing, and embroiled discoursing, “I yet keep; still more inseparably the Name, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh.  From the veil can nothing be inferred:  a piece of now quite faded Persian silk, like thousands of others.  On the Name I have many times meditated and conjectured; but neither in this lay there any clew.  That it was my unknown Father’s name I must hesitate to believe.  To no purpose have I searched through all the Herald’s Books, in and without the German Empire, and through all manner of Subscriber-Lists (Pranumeranten), Militia-Rolls, and other Name-catalogues; extraordinary names as we have in Germany, the name Teufelsdrockh, except as appended to my own person, nowhere occurs.  Again, what may the unchristian rather than Christian ‘Diogenes’ mean?  Did that reverend Basket-bearer intend, by such designation, to shadow forth my future destiny, or his own present malign humor?  Perhaps the latter, perhaps both.  Thou ill-starred Parent, who like an Ostrich hadst to leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatched into self-support by the mere sky-influences of Chance, can thy pilgrimage have been a smooth one?  Beset by Misfortune thou doubtless hast been; or indeed by the worst figure of Misfortune, by Misconduct.  Often have I fancied how, in thy hard life-battle, thou wert shot at, and slung at, wounded, hand-fettered, hamstrung, browbeaten and bedevilled by the Time-Spirit (Zeitgeist) in thyself and others, till the good soul first given thee was seered into grim rage, and thou hadst nothing for it but to leave in me an indignant appeal to the Future, and living speaking Protest against the Devil, as that same Spirit not of the Time only, but of Time itself, is well named!  Which Appeal and Protest, may I now modestly add, was not perhaps quite lost in air.

“For indeed, as Walter Shandy often insisted, there is much, nay almost all, in Names.  The Name is the earliest Garment you wrap round the earth-visiting ME; to which it thenceforth cleaves, more tenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin.  And now from without, what mystic influences does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seedgrain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree!  Names?  Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus.  Not only all common Speech, but Science, Poetry itself is no other, if thou consider it, than a right Naming.  Adam’s first task was giving names to natural Appearances:  what is ours still but a continuation of the same; be the Appearances exotic-vegetable, organic, mechanic, stars, or starry movements (as in Science); or (as in Poetry) passions, virtues, calamities, God-attributes, Gods?—­In a very plain sense the Proverb says, Call one a thief, and he will steal; in an almost similar sense may we not perhaps say, Call one Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, and he will open the Philosophy of Clothes?”