ce that makes us free. The young spirit
has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time; as yet
Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean; years to
the child are as ages: ah! the secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or
quicker decay and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric,
from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in
a motionless Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling
Universe is forever denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair
Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou
too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles;
thou too, with old Arnauld, wilt have to say in stern patience: 'Rest?
Rest? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?' Celestial Nepenthe!
though a Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he
finds thee not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on
the eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For as yet, sleep
and waking are one: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and
everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if
in youth, too frost-nipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no
fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stone-fruit, of which the fewest can
find the kernel."

In such rose-colored light does our Professor, as Poets are wont, look
back on his childhood; the historical details of which (to say nothing
of much other vague oratorical matter) he accordingly dwells on with an
almost wearisome minuteness. We hear of Entepfuhl standing "in trustful
derangement" among the woody slopes; the paternal Orchard flanking it as
extreme outpost from below; the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by, among
beech-rows, through river after river, into the Donau, into the Black
Sea, into the Atmosphere and Universe; and how "the brave old Linden,"
stretching like a parasol of twenty ells in radius, overtopping all
other rows and clumps, towered up from the central _Agora_ and _Campus
Martius_ of the Village, like its Sacred Tree; and how the old men sat
talking under its shadow (Gneschen often greedily listening), and the
wearied laborers reclined, and the unwearied children sported, and the
young men and maidens often danced to flute-music. "Glorious summer
twilights," cries Teufelsdrockh, "when the Sun, like a proud Conqueror
and Imperial Taskmaster, turned his back, with his gold-purple