xed objects; above all, in combination, wherein,
by mutual guidance, by all manner of loans and borrowings, each could
manifoldly aid the other? How wilt thou sail in unknown seas; and for
thyself find that shorter Northwest Passage to thy fair Spice-country
of a Nowhere?--A solitary rover, on such a voyage, with such nautical
tactics, will meet with adventures. Nay, as we forthwith discover, a
certain Calypso-Island detains him at the very outset; and as it were
falsifies and oversets his whole reckoning.

"If in youth," writes he once, "the Universe is majestically unveiling,
and everywhere Heaven revealing itself on Earth, nowhere to the Young
Man does this Heaven on Earth so immediately reveal itself as in the
Young Maiden. Strangely enough, in this strange life of ours, it
has been so appointed. On the whole, as I have often said, a
Person (_Personlichkeit_) is ever holy to us; a certain orthodox
Anthropomorphism connects my _Me_ with all _Thees_ in bonds of Love: but
it is in this approximation of the Like and Unlike, that such heavenly
attraction, as between Negative and Positive, first burns out into a
flame. Is the pitifullest mortal Person, think you, indifferent to us?
Is it not rather our heartfelt wish to be made one with him; to unite
him to us, by gratitude, by admiration, even by fear; or failing all
these, unite ourselves to him? But how much more, in this case of the
Like-Unlike! Here is conceded us the higher mystic possibility of such
a union, the highest in our Earth; thus, in the conducting medium of
Fantasy, flames forth that fire-development of the universal Spiritual
Electricity, which, as unfolded between man and woman, we first
emphatically denominate LOVE.

"In every well-conditioned stripling, as I conjecture, there already
blooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve; nor,
in the stately vistas, and flowerage and foliage of that Garden, is a
Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof, wanting.
Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier, if Cherubim and a Flaming
Sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant him, the
imaginative stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy season of
virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestial barrier; and
the sacred air-cities of Hope have not shrunk into the mean clay-hamlets
of Reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free!

"As for our young Forlorn," continues Teufelsdrockh e