eations,
be followed by, and again follow, the autumnal decay, the winter
dissolution. For man lives in Time, has his whole earthly being,
endeavor 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 alone their work, and to our prayers and martyrdoms
the new Spring has been vouchsafed."

That in the environment, here mysteriously enough shadowed forth,
Teufelsdrockh 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 favorite 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, was as yet a Machine! However, such a conscious,
recognized groundplan, the truest I had, _was_ beginning to be there,
and by additional experiments might be corrected and indefinitely
extended."

Thus from poverty does the strong educe nobler wealth; thus in the
destitution of the wild desert does our young