To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so passionate Teufelsdrockh precipitated through “a shivered Universe” in this extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do:  Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his brains.  In the progress towards any of which consummations, do not such readers anticipate extravagance enough; breast-beating, brow-beating (against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemy and the like, stampings, smitings, breakages of furniture, if not arson itself?

Nowise so does Teufelsdrockh deport him.  He quietly lifts his Pilgerstab (Pilgrim-staff), “old business being soon wound up;” and begins a perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous Globe!  Curious it is, indeed, how with such vivacity of conception, such intensity of feeling, above all, with these unconscionable habits of Exaggeration in speech, he combines that wonderful stillness of his, that stoicism in external procedure.  Thus, if his sudden bereavement, in this matter of the Flower-goddess, is talked of as a real Doomsday and Dissolution of Nature, in which light doubtless it partly appeared to himself, his own nature is nowise dissolved thereby; but rather is compressed closer.  For once, as we might say, a Blumine by magic appliances has unlocked that shut heart of his, and its hidden things rush out tumultuous, boundless, like genii enfranchised from their glass vial:  but no sooner are your magic appliances withdrawn, than the strange casket of a heart springs to again; and perhaps there is now no key extant that will open it; for a Teufelsdrockh as we remarked, will not love a second time.  Singular Diogenes!  No sooner has that heart-rending occurrence fairly taken place, than he affects to regard it as a thing natural, of which there is nothing more to be said.  “One highest hope, seemingly legible in the eyes of an Angel, had recalled him as out of Death-shadows into celestial Life:  but a gleam of Tophet passed over the face of his Angel; he was rapt away in whirlwinds, and heard the laughter of Demons.  It was a Calenture,” adds he, “whereby the Youth saw green Paradise-groves in the waste Ocean-waters:  a lying vision, yet not wholly a lie, for he saw it.”  But what things soever passed in him, when he ceased to see it; what ragings and despairings soever Teufelsdrockh’s soul was the scene of, he has the goodness to conceal under a quite opaque cover of Silence.  We know it well; the first mad paroxysm past, our brave Gneschen collected his dismembered philosophies, and buttoned himself together; he was meek, silent, or spoke of the weather and the Journals:  only by a transient knitting of those shaggy brows, by some deep flash of those eyes, glancing one knew not whether with tear-dew or with fierce fire,—­might you have guessed what a Gehenna was within:  that a whole Satanic School were spouting, though inaudibly, there.  To consume your own choler, as some chimneys consume their own smoke; to keep a whole Satanic School spouting, if it must spout, inaudibly, is a negative yet no slight virtue, nor one of the commonest in these times.