Childhood brings with it much that is sweet and gentle, flowing on like the little Kuhbach; and yet suggests far thoughts of Time and Eternity, concerning which we are evidently to hear more before the end.  The formal education he receives—­that “wood and leather education”—­calls forth only protest.  But the development of his spirit proceeds in spite of it.  So far as the passive side of character goes, he does excellently.  On the active side things go not so well.  Already he begins to chafe at the restraints of obedience, and the youthful spirit is beating against its bars.  The stupidities of an education which only appeals to the one faculty of memory, and to that mainly by means of birch-rods, increase the rebellion, and the sense of restraint is brought to a climax when at last old Andreas dies.  Then “the dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open; the pale kingdoms of Death, with all their innumerable silent nations and generations, stood before him; the inexorable word NEVER! now first showed its meaning.”

The youth is now ready to enter, as such a one inevitably must, upon the long and losing battle of faith and doubt.  He is at the theorising stage as yet, not having learned to make anything, but only to discuss things.  And yet the time is not wasted if the mind have been taught to think.  For “truly a Thinking Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have.”

The immediate consequence and employment of this unripe time of half-awakened manhood is, however, unsatisfactory enough.  There is much reminiscence of early Edinburgh days, with their law studies, and tutoring, and translating, in Teufelsdroeckh’s desultory period.  The climax of it is in those scornful sentences about Aesthetic Teas, to which the hungry lion was invited, that he might feed on chickweed—­well for all concerned if it did not end in his feeding on the chickens instead!  It is an unwholesome time with the lad—­a time of sullen contempt alternating with loud rebellion, of mingled vanity and self-indulgence, and of much sheer devilishness of temper.

Upon this exaggerated and most disagreeable period, lit by “red streaks of unspeakable grandeur, yet also in the blackness of darkness,” there comes suddenly the master passion of romantic love.  Had this adventure proved successful, we should have simply had the old story, which ends in “so they lived happily ever after.”  What the net result of all the former strivings after truth and freedom would have been, we need not inquire.  For this is another story, equally old and to the end of time ever newly repeated.  There is much of Werther in it, and still more of Jean Paul Richter.  Its finest English counterpart is Longfellow’s Hyperion—­the most beautiful piece of our literature, surely, that has ever been forgotten—­in which Richter’s story lives again.  But never has the tale been more exquisitely told than in Sartor Resartus.  For one sweet hour of life the