of his fortune. Everywhere
cast out, like oil out of water, from mingling in any Employment, in
any public Communion, he has no portion but Solitude, and a life of
Meditation. The whole energy of his existence is directed, through long
years, on one task: that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure it. Thus
everywhere do the Shows of things oppress him, withstand him, threaten
him with fearfullest destruction: only by victoriously penetrating into
Things themselves can he find peace and a stronghold. But is not this
same looking through the Shows, or Vestures, into the Things, even the
first preliminary to a _Philosophy of Clothes_? Do we not, in all
this, discern some beckonings towards the true higher purport of such
a Philosophy; and what shape it must assume with such a man, in such an
era?

Perhaps in entering on Book Third, the courteous Reader is not utterly
without guess whither he is bound: nor, let us hope, for all the
fantastic Dream-Grottos through which, as is our lot with Teufelsdrockh,
he must wander, will there be wanting between whiles some twinkling of a
steady Polar Star.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I. INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY.

As a wonder-loving and wonder-seeking man, Teufelsdrockh, from an
early part of this Clothes-Volume, has more and more exhibited himself.
Striking it was, amid all his perverse cloudiness, with what force
of vision and of heart he pierced into the mystery of the World;
recognizing in the highest sensible phenomena, so far as Sense went,
only fresh or faded Raiment; yet ever, under this, a celestial Essence
thereby rendered visible: and while, on the one hand, he trod the old
rags of Matter, with their tinsels, into the mire, he on the other
everywhere exalted Spirit above all earthly principalities and powers,
and worshipped it, though under the meanest shapes, with a true
Platonic mysticism. What the man ultimately purposed by thus casting his
Greek-fire into the general Wardrobe of the Universe; what such, more
or less complete, rending and burning of Garments throughout the whole
compass of Civilized Life and Speculation, should lead to; the rather as
he was no Adamite, in any sense, and could not, like Rousseau, recommend
either bodily or intellectual Nudity, and a return to the savage
state: all this our readers are now bent to discover; this is, in fact,
properly the gist and purport of Professor Teufelsdrockh's Philosophy of
Clothes.

Be it remembered, however, th