Terrors;
for this poor Cordwainer, as we said, was a Man; and the Temple of
Immensity, wherein as Man he had been sent to minister, was full of holy
mystery to him.

"The Clergy of the neighborhood, the ordained Watchers and Interpreters
of that same holy mystery, listened with un-affected tedium to his
consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such doubts, to
'drink beer, and dance with the girls.' Blind leaders of the blind!
For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what were their
shovel-hats scooped out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons girt
on; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other
racketing, held over that spot of God's Earth,--if Man were but a Patent
Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality? Fox turned
from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather-parings
and his Bible. Mountains of encumbrance, higher than AEtna, had been
heaped over that Spirit: but it was a Spirit, and would not lie buried
there. Through long days and nights of silent agony, it struggled and
wrestled, with a man's force, to be free: how its prison-mountains
heaved and swayed tumultuously, as the giant spirit shook them to this
hand and that, and emerged into the light of Heaven! That Leicester
shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican or
Loretto-shrine.--'So bandaged, and hampered, and hemmed in,' groaned he,
'with thousand requisitions, obligations, straps, tatters, and tagrags,
I can neither see nor move: not my own am I, but the World's; and Time
flies fast, and Heaven is high, and Hell is deep: Man! bethink thee,
if thou hast power of Thought! Why not; what binds me here? Want,
want!--Ha, of what? Will all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me
across into that far Land of Light? Only Meditation can, and devout
Prayer to God. I will to the woods: the hollow of a tree will lodge
me, wild berries feed me; and for Clothes, cannot I stitch myself one
perennial suit of Leather!'

"Historical Oil-painting," continues Teufelsdrockh, "is one of the Arts
I never practiced; therefore shall I not decide whether this subject
were easy of execution on the canvas. Yet often has it seemed to me as
if such first outflashing of man's Freewill, to lighten, more and
more into Day, the Chaotic Night that threatened to engulf him in its
hindrances and its horrors, were properly the only grandeur there is
in History. Let some living Angelo or Ro