“At length, after so much roasting,” thus writes our Autobiographer, “I was what you might name calcined.  Pray only that it be not rather, as is the more frequent issue, reduced to a caput-mortuum!  But in any case, by mere dint of practice, I had grown familiar with many things.  Wretchedness was still wretched; but I could now partly see through it, and despise it.  Which highest mortal, in this inane Existence, had I not found a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted; and, when I looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough?  Thy wishes have all been sniffed aside, thought I:  but what, had they even been all granted!  Did not the Boy Alexander weep because he had not two Planets to conquer; or a whole Solar System; or after that, a whole Universe? Ach Gott, when I gazed into these Stars, have they not looked down on me as if with pity, from their serene spaces; like Eyes glistening with heavenly tears over the little lot of man!  Thousands of human generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up of Time, and there remains no wreck of them any more; and Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the Shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar.  Pshaw! what is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there?  Thou art still Nothing, Nobody:  true; but who, then, is Something, Somebody?  For thee the Family of Man has no use; it rejects thee; thou art wholly as a dissevered limb:  so be it; perhaps it is better so!”

Too-heavy-laden Teufelsdrockh!  Yet surely his bands are loosening; one day he will hurl the burden far from him, and bound forth free and with a second youth.

“This,” says our Professor, “was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now reached; through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass.”

CHAPTER IX.  THE EVERLASTING YEA.

“Temptations in the Wilderness!” exclaims Teufelsdrockh, “Have we not all to be tried with such?  Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed.  Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force:  thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle.  For the God-given mandate, Work thou in Well-doing, lies mysteriously written, in Promethean Prophetic Characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, a visible, acted Gospel of Freedom.  And as the clay-given mandate, Eat thou and be filled, at the same time persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve,—­must not there be a confusion, a contest, before the better Influence can become the upper?