these prosaic Auscultators may have sniffed at him, with his
strange ways; and tried to hate, and what was much more impossible, to
despise him. Friendly communion, in any case, there could not be:
already has the young Teufelsdroeckh left the other young geese; and
swims apart, though as yet uncertain whether he himself is cygnet or
gosling.

Perhaps, too, what little employment he had was performed ill, at best
unpleasantly. 'Great practical method and expertness' he may brag of;
but is there not also great practical pride, though deep-hidden, only
the deeper-seated? So shy a man can never have been popular. We figure
to ourselves, how in those days he may have played strange freaks with
his independence, and so forth: do not his own words betoken as much?
'Like a very young person, I imagined it was with Work alone, and not
also with Folly and Sin, in myself and others, that I had been
appointed to struggle.' Be this as it may, his progress from the
passive Auscultatorship, towards any active Assessorship, is evidently
of the slowest. By degrees, those same established men, once partially
inclined to patronise him, seem to withdraw their countenance, and
give him up as 'a man of genius': against which procedure he, in these
Papers, loudly protests. 'As if,' says he, 'the higher did not
presuppose the lower; as if he who can fly into heaven, could not also
walk post if he resolved on it! But the world is an old woman, and
mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often
cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.'

How our winged sky-messenger, unaccepted as a terrestrial runner,
contrived, in the mean while, to keep himself from flying skyward
without return, is not too clear from these Documents. Good old
Gretchen seems to have vanished from the scene, perhaps from the
Earth; other Horn of Plenty, or even of Parsimony, nowhere flows for
him; so that 'the prompt nature of Hunger being well known,' we are
not without our anxiety. From private Tuition, in never so many
languages and sciences, the aid derivable is small; neither, to use
his own words, 'does the young Adventurer hitherto suspect in himself
any literary gift; but at best earns bread-and-water wages, by his
wide faculty of Translation. Nevertheless,' continues he, 'that I
subsisted is clear, for you find me even now alive.' Which fact,
however, except upon the principle of our true-hearted, kind old
Proverb, that 't