hen I gazed
into these Stars, have they not looked down on me as if with pity, from
their serene spaces; like Eyes glistening with heavenly tears over the
little lot of man! Thousands of human generations, all as noisy as our
own, have been swallowed up of Time, and there remains no wreck of them
any more; and Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still
shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the Shepherd first
noted them in the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry little
Dog-cage of an Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? Thou art
still Nothing, Nobody: true; but who, then, is Something, Somebody? For
thee the Family of Man has no use; it rejects thee; thou art wholly as a
dissevered limb: so be it; perhaps it is better so!"

Too-heavy-laden Teufelsdrockh! Yet surely his bands are loosening; one
day he will hurl the burden far from him, and bound forth free and with
a second youth.

"This," says our Professor, "was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now
reached; through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the
Positive must necessarily pass."

CHAPTER IX. THE EVERLASTING YEA.

"Temptations in the Wilderness!" exclaims Teufelsdrockh, "Have we not
all to be tried with such? Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged in us
by birth, be dispossessed. Our Life is compassed round with Necessity;
yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary
Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially,
a hard-fought battle. For the God-given mandate, _Work thou in
Well-doing_, lies mysteriously written, in Promethean Prophetic
Characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it
be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, a visible,
acted Gospel of Freedom. And as the clay-given mandate, _Eat thou and
be filled_, at the same time persuasively proclaims itself through every
nerve,--must not there be a confusion, a contest, before the better
Influence can become the upper?

"To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such
God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay
must now be vanquished or vanquish,--should be carried of the spirit
into grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle
with him; defiantly setting him at naught till he yield and fly. Name
it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the
natural Desert of rocks and sands,