'

With 'the little one's friendship for cattle and poultry' we shall not
much intermeddle. It may be that hereby he acquired a 'certain deeper
sympathy with animated Nature': but when, we would ask, saw any man,
in a collection of Biographical Documents, such a piece as this:
'Impressive enough (_bedeutungsvoll_) was it to hear, in early
morning, the Swineherd's horn; and know that so many hungry happy
quadrupeds were, on all sides, starting in hot haste to join him, for
breakfast on the Heath. Or to see them at eventide, all marching-in
again, with short squeak, almost in military order; and each,
topographically correct, trotting-off in succession to the right or
left, through its own lane, to its own dwelling; till old Kunz, at the
Village-head, now left alone, blew his last blast, and retired for the
night. We are wont to love the Hog chiefly in the form of Ham; yet did
not these bristly thick-skinned beings here manifest intelligence,
perhaps humour of character; at any rate, a touching, trustful
submissiveness to Man,--who, were he but a Swineherd, in darned
gabardine, and leather breeches more resembling slate or
discoloured-tin breeches, is still the Hierarch of this lower world?'

It is maintained, by Helvetius and his set, that an infant of genius
is quite the same as any other infant, only that certain surprisingly
favourable influences accompany him through life, especially through
childhood, and expand him, while others lie closefolded and continue
dunces. Herein, say they, consists the whole difference between an
inspired Prophet and a double-barrelled Game-preserver: the inner man
of the one has been fostered into generous development; that of the
other, crushed-down perhaps by vigour of animal digestion, and the
like, has exuded and evaporated, or at best sleeps now irresuscitably
stagnant at the bottom of his stomach. 'With which opinion,' cries
Teufelsdroeckh, 'I should as soon agree as with this other, that an
acorn might, by favourable or unfavourable influences of soil and
climate, be nursed into a cabbage, or the cabbage-seed into an oak.

'Nevertheless,' continues he, 'I too acknowledge the all-but
omnipotence of early culture and nurture: hereby we have either a
doddered dwarf bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree; either a
sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it
is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note-down
with accuracy the charac