h growing naturally from the other, through the several stages of a
happy Youthful Love; till the whole were safely burnt out; and the young
soul relieved with little damage! Happy, if it did not rather prove a
Conflagration and mad Explosion; painfully lacerating the heart itself;
nay perhaps bursting the heart in pieces (which were Death); or at best,
bursting the thin walls of your "reverberating furnace," so that it rage
thenceforth all unchecked among the contiguous combustibles (which
were Madness): till of the so fair and manifold internal world of our
Diogenes, there remained Nothing, or only the "crater of an extinct
volcano"!

From multifarious Documents in this Bag _Capricornus_, and in the
adjacent ones on both sides thereof, it becomes manifest that our
philosopher, as stoical and cynical as he now looks, was heartily and
even frantically in Love: here therefore may our old doubts whether his
heart were of stone or of flesh give way. He loved once; not wisely
but too well. And once only: for as your Congreve needs a new case or
wrappage for every new rocket, so each human heart can properly exhibit
but one Love, if even one; the "First Love which is infinite" can be
followed by no second like unto it. In more recent years, accordingly,
the Editor of these Sheets was led to regard Teufelsdrockh as a man
not only who would never wed, but who would never even flirt; whom the
grand-climacteric itself, and _St. Martin's Summer_ of incipient Dotage,
would crown with no new myrtle-garland. To the Professor, women are
henceforth Pieces of Art; of Celestial Art, indeed, which celestial
pieces he glories to survey in galleries, but has lost thought of
purchasing.

Psychological readers are not without curiosity to see how Teufelsdrockh
in this for him unexampled predicament, demeans himself; with what
specialties of successive configuration, splendor and color, his
Firework blazes off. Small, as usual, is the satisfaction that such can
meet with here. From amid these confused masses of Eulogy and Elegy,
with their mad Petrarchan and Werterean ware lying madly scattered among
all sorts of quite extraneous matter, not so much as the fair one's name
can be deciphered. For, without doubt, the title _Blumine_, whereby she
is here designated, and which means simply Goddess of Flowers, must be
fictitious. Was her real name Flora, then? But what was her surname,
or had she none? Of what station in Life was she; of what pare