ler minds, the publishing
of some such Work of Art, in one or the other dialect, becomes almost
a necessity. For what is it properly but an Altercation with the
Devil, before you begin honestly Fighting him? Your Byron publishes
his _Sorrows of Lord George_, in verse and in prose, and copiously
otherwise: your Bonaparte represents his _Sorrows of Napoleon_ Opera,
in an all-too stupendous style; with music of cannon-volleys,
and murder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lights are the fires of
Conflagration; his rhyme and recitative are the tramp of embattled
Hosts and the sound of falling Cities.--Happier is he who, like our
Clothes-Philosopher, can write such matter, since it must be written,
on the insensible Earth, with his shoe-soles only; and also survive the
writing thereof!

CHAPTER VII. THE EVERLASTING NO.

Under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our Professor has now
shrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nevertheless
progressive, and growing: for how can the "Son of Time," in any case,
stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in a state of
crisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general solution
into aimless Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation;
wherefrom the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve
itself?

Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is
sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old one
upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual acts
and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of
anarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as,
indeed, how could there be other? Have we not seen him disappointed,
bemocked of Destiny, through long years? All that the young heart might
desire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst instance,
offered and then snatched away. Ever an "excellent Passivity;" but of
useful, reasonable Activity, essential to the former as Food to Hunger,
nothing granted: till at length, in this wild Pilgrimage, he must
forcibly seize for himself an Activity, though useless, unreasonable.
Alas, his cup of bitterness, which had been filling drop by drop, ever
since that first "ruddy morning" in the Hinterschlag Gymnasium, was at
the very lip; and then with that poison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Blumine
business, it runs over, and even hisses over in a deluge of foam.

He himself says once