Were it not cruel in these circumstances, here might be the place to insert an observation, gleaned long ago from the great Clothes-Volume, where it stands with quite other intent:  “Some time before Small-pox was extirpated,” says the Professor, “there came a new malady of the spiritual sort on Europe:  I mean the epidemic, now endemical, of View-hunting.  Poets of old date, being privileged with Senses, had also enjoyed external Nature; but chiefly as we enjoy the crystal cup which holds good or bad liquor for us; that is to say, in silence, or with slight incidental commentary:  never, as I compute, till after the Sorrows of Werter, was there man found who would say:  Come let us make a Description!  Having drunk the liquor, come let us eat the glass!  Of which endemic the Jenner is unhappily still to seek.”  Too true!

We reckon it more important to remark that the Professor’s Wanderings, so far as his stoical and cynical envelopment admits us to clear insight, here first take their permanent character, fatuous or not.  That Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four seems to have withered up what little remnant of a purpose may have still lurked in him:  Life has become wholly a dark labyrinth; wherein, through long years, our Friend, flying from spectres, has to stumble about at random, and naturally with more haste than progress.

Foolish were it in us to attempt following him, even from afar, in this extraordinary world-pilgrimage of his; the simplest record of which, were clear record possible, would fill volumes.  Hopeless is the obscurity, unspeakable the confusion.  He glides from country to country, from condition to condition; vanishing and reappearing, no man can calculate how or where.  Through all quarters of the world he wanders, and apparently through all circles of society.  If in any scene, perhaps difficult to fix geographically, he settles for a time, and forms connections, be sure he will snap them abruptly asunder.  Let him sink out of sight as Private Scholar (Privatsirender), living by the grace of God in some European capital, you may next find him as Hadjee in the neighborhood of Mecca.  It is an inexplicable Phantasmagoria, capricious, quick-changing; as if our Traveller, instead of limbs and highways, had transported himself by some wishing-carpet, or Fortunatus’ Hat.  The whole, too, imparted emblematically, in dim multifarious tokens (as that collection of Street-Advertisements); with only some touch of direct historical notice sparingly interspersed:  little light-islets in the world of haze!  So that, from this point, the Professor is more of an enigma than ever.  In figurative language, we might say he becomes, not indeed a spirit, yet spiritualized, vaporized.  Fact unparalleled in Biography:  The river of his History, which we have traced from its tiniest fountains, and hoped to see flow onward, with increasing current, into the ocean, here dashes itself over that terrific Lover’s Leap; and, as a mad-foaming cataract, flies wholly into tumultuous clouds of spray!  Low down it indeed collects again into pools and plashes; yet only at a great distance, and with difficulty, if at all, into a general stream.  To cast a glance into certain of those pools and plashes, and trace whither they run, must, for a chapter or two, form the limit of our endeavor.