or in the populous moral Desert of
selfishness and baseness,--to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy
if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine
handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendor;
but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders, in dull pain, in
darkness, under earthly vapors!--Our Wilderness is the wide World in
an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long years of suffering and
fasting: nevertheless, to these also comes an end. Yes, to me also was
given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness of Battle, and the
resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty is left. To me also,
entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and
of sound, it was given, after weariest wanderings, to work out my way
into the higher sunlit slopes--of that Mountain which has no summit, or
whose summit is in Heaven only!"

He says elsewhere, under a less ambitious figure; as figures are, once
for all, natural to him: "Has not thy Life been that of most sufficient
men (_tuchtigen Manner_) thou hast known in this generation? An outflush
of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the first fallow-crop, wherein are as
many weeds as valuable herbs: this all parched away, under the Droughts
of practical and spiritual Unbelief, as Disappointment, in thought and
act, often-repeated gave rise to Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled
into Denial! If I have had a second-crop, and now see the perennial
greensward, and sit under umbrageous cedars, which defy all Drought (and
Doubt); herein too, be the Heavens praised, I am not without examples,
and even exemplars."

So that, for Teufelsdrockh, also, there has been a "glorious
revolution:" these mad shadow-hunting and shadow-hunted Pilgrimings of
his were but some purifying "Temptation in the Wilderness," before his
apostolic work (such as it was) could begin; which Temptation is now
happily over, and the Devil once more worsted! Was "that high moment in
the _Rue de l'Enfer_," then, properly the turning-point of the battle;
when the Fiend said, _Worship me, or be torn in shreds_; and was
answered valiantly with an _Apage Satana_?--Singular Teufelsdrockh,
would thou hadst told thy singular story in plain words! But it is
fruitless to look there, in those Paper-bags, for such. Nothing but
innuendoes, figurative crotchets: a typical Shadow, fitfully wavering,
prophetico-satiric; no clear logical Picture. "How paint to t