ot. If our era is
the Era of Unbelief, why murmur under it; is there not a better
coming, nay come? As in long-drawn Systole and long-drawn Diastole,
must the period of Faith alternate with the period of Denial; must the
vernal growth, the summer luxuriance of all Opinions, Spiritual
Representations and Creations, be followed by, and again follow, the
autumnal decay, the winter dissolution. For man lives in Time, has his
whole earthly being, endeavour and destiny shaped for him by Time:
only in the transitory Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eternity we
stand on made manifest. And yet, in such winter-seasons of Denial, it
is for the nobler-minded perhaps a comparative misery to have been
born, and to be awake and work; and for the duller a felicity, if,
like hibernating animals, safe-lodged in some Salamanca University, or
Sybaris City, or other superstitious or voluptuous Castle of
Indolence, they can slumber-through, in stupid dreams, and only awaken
when the loud-roaring hailstorms have all done their work, and to our
prayers and martyrdoms the new Spring has been vouchsafed.'

That in the environment, here mysteriously enough shadowed forth,
Teufelsdroeckh must have felt ill at ease, cannot be doubtful. 'The
hungry young,' he says, 'looked up to their spiritual Nurses; and, for
food, were bidden eat the east-wind. What vain jargon of controversial
Metaphysic, Etymology, and mechanical Manipulation falsely named
Science, was current there, I indeed learned, better perhaps than the
most. Among eleven-hundred Christian youths, there will not be wanting
some eleven eager to learn. By collision with such, a certain warmth,
a certain polish was communicated; by instinct and happy accident, I
took less to rioting (_renommiren_), than to thinking and reading,
which latter also I was free to do. Nay from the chaos of that
Library, I succeeded in fishing-up more books perhaps than had been
known to the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a Literary Life
was hereby laid : I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently in
almost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and sciences;
farther, as man is ever the prime object to man, already it was my
favourite employment to read character in speculation, and from the
Writing to construe the Writer. A certain groundplan of Human Nature
and Life began to fashion itself in me; wondrous enough, now when I
look back on it; for my whole Universe, physical and spiritual,