nce, if not even Placidity? Did we not hear him complain that
the World was a 'huge Ragfair,' and the 'rags and tatters of old
Symbols' were raining-down everywhere, like to drift him in, and
suffocate him? What with those 'unhunted Helots' of his; and the
uneven _sic-vos-non-vobis_ pressure and hard-crashing collision he is
pleased to discern in existing things; what with the so hateful 'empty
Masks,' full of beetles and spiders, yet glaring out on him, from
their glass eyes, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,'--we feel
entitled to conclude him even willing that much should be thrown to
the Devil, so it were but done gently! Safe himself in that 'Pinnacle
of Weissnichtwo,' he would consent, with a tragic solemnity, that the
monster UTILITARIA, held back, indeed, and moderated by nose-rings,
halters, foot-shackles, and every conceivable modification of rope,
should go forth to do her work;--to tread down old ruinous Palaces
and Temples with her broad hoof, till the whole were trodden down,
that new and better might be built! Remarkable in this point of view
are the following sentences.

'Society,' says he, 'is not dead: that Carcass, which you call dead
Society, is but her mortal coil which she has shuffled off, to assume
a nobler; she herself, through perpetual metamorphoses, in fairer and
fairer development, has to live till Time also merge in Eternity.
Wheresoever two or three Living Men are gathered together, there is
Society; or there it will be, with its cunning mechanisms and
stupendous structures, overspreading this little Globe, and reaching
upwards to Heaven and downwards to Gehenna: for always, under one or
the other figure, it has two authentic Revelations, of a God and of a
Devil; the Pulpit, namely, and the Gallows.'

Indeed, we already heard him speak of 'Religion, in unnoticed nooks,
weaving for herself new Vestures';--Teufelsdroeckh himself being one of
the loom-treadles? Elsewhere he quotes without censure that strange
aphorism of Saint-Simon's, concerning which and whom so much were to
be said: _L'age d'or, qu'une aveugle tradition a place jusqu'ici dans
le passe, est devant nous_; The golden age, which a blind tradition
has hitherto placed in the Past, is Before us.'--But listen again:

'When the Phoenix is fanning her funeral pyre, will there not be
sparks flying! Alas, some millions of men, and among them such as a
Napoleon, have already been licked into that high-eddying Flame, and
like moths