fateful note, as if
through a trumpet he were proclaiming: "Ghosts of Life, come to
Judgment!" Reck not, ye fluttering Ghosts: he will purify you in his
Purgatory, with fire and with water; and, one day, new-created ye
shall reappear. O, let him in whom the flame of Devotion is ready to
go out, who has never worshipped, and knows not what to worship, pace
and repace, with austerest thought, the pavement of Monmouth Street,
and say whether his heart and his eyes still continue dry. If Field
Lane, with its long fluttering rows of yellow handkerchiefs, be a
Dionysius' Ear, where, in stifled jarring hubbub, we hear the
Indictment which Poverty and Vice bring against lazy Wealth, that it
has left them there cast-out and trodden under foot of Want, Darkness
and the Devil,--then is Monmouth Street a Mirza's Hill, where, in
motley vision, the whole Pageant of Existence passes awfully before
us; with its wail and jubilee, mad loves and mad hatreds, church-bells
and gallows-ropes, farce-tragedy, beast-godhood,--the Bedlam of
Creation!'

* * * * *

To most men, as it does to ourselves, all this will seem overcharged.
We too have walked through Monmouth Street; but with little feeling of
'Devotion': probably in part because the contemplative process is so
fatally broken in upon by the brood of money-changers who nestle in that
Church, and importune the worshipper with merely secular proposals.
Whereas Teufelsdroeckh might be in that happy middle state, which
leaves to the Clothes-broker no hope either of sale or of purchase,
and so be allowed to linger there without molestation.--Something we
would have given to see the little philosophical figure, with its
steeple-hat and loose flowing skirts, and eyes in a fine frenzy,
'pacing and repacing in austerest thought' that foolish Street; which
to him was a true Delphic avenue, and supernatural Whispering-gallery,
where the 'Ghosts of Life' rounded strange secrets in his ear. O thou
philosophic Teufelsdroeckh, that listenest while others only gabble,
and with thy quick tympanum hearest the grass grow!

At the same time, is it not strange that, in Paper-bag Documents
destined for an English work, there exists nothing like an authentic
diary of this his sojourn in London; and of his Meditations among the
Clothes-shops only the obscurest emblematic shadows? Neither, in
conversation (for, indeed, he was not a man to pester you with his
Travels), have we h