“To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay must now be vanquished or vanquish,—­should be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at naught till he yield and fly.  Name it as we choose:  with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness,—­to such Temptation are we all called.  Unhappy if we are not!  Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendor; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights:  or smoulders, in dull pain, in darkness, under earthly vapors!—­Our Wilderness is the wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long years of suffering and fasting:  nevertheless, to these also comes an end.  Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness of Battle, and the resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty is left.  To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after weariest wanderings, to work out my way into the higher sunlit slopes—­of that Mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only!”

He says elsewhere, under a less ambitious figure; as figures are, once for all, natural to him:  “Has not thy Life been that of most sufficient men (tuchtigen Manner) thou hast known in this generation?  An outflush of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the first fallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds as valuable herbs:  this all parched away, under the Droughts of practical and spiritual Unbelief, as Disappointment, in thought and act, often-repeated gave rise to Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled into Denial!  If I have had a second-crop, and now see the perennial greensward, and sit under umbrageous cedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, be the Heavens praised, I am not without examples, and even exemplars.”

So that, for Teufelsdrockh, also, there has been a “glorious revolution:”  these mad shadow-hunting and shadow-hunted Pilgrimings of his were but some purifying “Temptation in the Wilderness,” before his apostolic work (such as it was) could begin; which Temptation is now happily over, and the Devil once more worsted!  Was “that high moment in the Rue de l’Enfer,” then, properly the turning-point of the battle; when the Fiend said, Worship me, or be torn in shreds; and was answered valiantly with an Apage Satana?—­Singular Teufelsdrockh, would thou hadst told thy singular story in plain words!  But it is fruitless to look there, in those Paper-bags, for such.  Nothing but innuendoes, figurative crotchets:  a typical Shadow, fitfully wavering, prophetico-satiric; no clear logical Picture.  “How paint to the sensual eye,” asks