essor will perhaps find himself
short. On a small slip, formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink being
all but invisible, we lately noticed, and with effort decipher,
the following: "What are your historical Facts; still more your
biographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Mankind, by stringing
together bead-rolls of what thou namest Facts? The Man is the spirit
he worked in; not what he did, but what he became. Facts are engraved
Hierograms, for which the fewest have the key. And then how your
Blockhead (_Dummkopf_) studies not their Meaning; but simply whether
they are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral! Still worse
is it with your Bungler (_Pfuscher_): such I have seen reading some
Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking the ill-cut
Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous reptile." Was the Professor
apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts himself,
might mistake the Teufelsdrockh Serpent-of-Eternity in like manner? For
which reason it was to be altered, not without underhand satire, into
a plainer Symbol? Or is this merely one of his half-sophisms,
half-truisms, which if he can but set on the back of a Figure, he cares
not whither it gallop? We say not with certainty; and indeed, so strange
is the Professor, can never say. If our suspicion be wholly unfounded,
let his own questionable ways, not our necessary circumspectness bear
the blame.

But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhausted
Editor determines here to shut these Paper-bags for the present. Let it
suffice that we know of Teufelsdrockh, so far, if "not what he did, yet
what he became:" the rather, as his character has now taken its ultimate
bent, and no new revolution, of importance, is to be looked for. The
imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche: and such, wheresoever
be its flight, it will continue. To trace by what complex gyrations
(flights or involuntary waftings) through the mere external
Life-element, Teufelsdrockh, reaches his University Professorship, and
the Psyche clothes herself in civic Titles, without altering her now
fixed nature,--would be comparatively an unproductive task, were we even
unsuspicious of its being, for us at least, a false and impossible one.
His outward Biography, therefore, which, at the Blumine Lover's-Leap, we
saw churned utterly into spray-vapor, may hover in that condition, for
aught that concerns us here. Enough that by survey of certai