tuously cast out. A feeble
unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing
given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet
impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was
there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to
mine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: why
should I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends,
in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an
incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little,
and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it was
a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even
speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that
they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of
their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as
it was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also,
as the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I,
like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil;
for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were
more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very
Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To
me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of
Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling
on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the
vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living
banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil;
nay, unless the Devil is your God?"

A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as the
worst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a Teufelsdrockh
threaten to fail? We conjecture that he has known sickness; and, in
spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of the chronic sort.
Hear this, for example: "How beautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper!
Quite another thing in practice; every window of your Feeling, even of
your Intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no
pure ray can enter; a whole Drug-shop in your inwards; the fordone soul
drowning slowly in quagmires of Disgust!"

Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we not
find in the following sentenc