ever more mysterious to me:  neither in the practical Mystery had I made the slightest progress, but been everywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast out.  A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness.  Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living:  was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine?  O Heaven, No, there was none!  I kept a lock upon my lips:  why should I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible tradition?  In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers.  Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in.  The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic.  In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle.  Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful:  but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil.  To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility:  it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.  Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!  Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious?  Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?”

A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as the worst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a Teufelsdrockh threaten to fail?  We conjecture that he has known sickness; and, in spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of the chronic sort.  Hear this, for example:  “How beautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper!  Quite another thing in practice; every window of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole Drug-shop in your inwards; the fordone soul drowning slowly in quagmires of Disgust!”

Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we not find in the following sentences, quite in our Professor’s still vein, significance enough?  “From Suicide a certain after-shine (Nachschein) of Christianity withheld me:  perhaps also a certain indolence of character; for, was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach?  Often, however, was there a question present to me:  Should some one now, at the turning of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, into the other World, or other No-world, by pistol-shot,—­how were it?  On which ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged cities and other death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which passed, falsely enough, for courage.”