ir general mass, will
form another. I could liken Dandyism and Drudgism to two bottomless
boiling Whirlpools that had broken out on opposite quarters of the firm
land: as yet they appear only disquieted, foolishly bubbling wells,
which man's art might cover in; yet mark them, their diameter is daily
widening: they are hollow Cones that boil up from the infinite Deep,
over which your firm land is but a thin crust or rind! Thus daily is
the intermediate land crumbling in, daily the empire of the two
Buchan-Bullers extending; till now there is but a foot-plank, a mere
film of Land between them; this too is washed away: and then--we have
the true Hell of Waters, and Noah's Deluge is out-deluged!

"Or better, I might call them two boundless, and indeed unexampled
Electric Machines (turned by the 'Machinery of Society'), with batteries
of opposite quality; Drudgism the Negative, Dandyism the Positive; one
attracts hourly towards it and appropriates all the Positive Electricity
of the nation (namely, the Money thereof); the other is equally busy
with the Negative (that is to say the Hunger), which is equally potent.
Hitherto you see only partial transient sparkles and sputters: but wait
a little, till the entire nation is in an electric state: till your
whole vital Electricity, no longer healthfully Neutral, is cut into two
isolated portions of Positive and Negative (of Money and of Hunger);
and stands there bottled up in two World-Batteries! The stirring of a
child's finger brings the two together; and then--What then? The Earth
is but shivered into impalpable smoke by that Doom's thunder-peal; the
Sun misses one of his Planets in Space, and thenceforth there are no
eclipses of the Moon.--Or better still, I might liken"--

Oh, enough, enough of likenings and similitudes; in excess of which,
truly, it is hard to say whether Teufelsdrockh or ourselves sin the
more.

We have often blamed him for a habit of wire-drawing and over-refining;
from of old we have been familiar with his tendency to Mysticism and
Religiosity, whereby in everything he was still scenting out Religion:
but never perhaps did these amaurosis-suffusions so cloud and distort
his otherwise most piercing vision, as in this of the _Dandiacal Body_!
Or was there something of intended satire; is the Professor and Seer
not quite the blinkard he affects to be? Of an ordinary mortal we should
have decisively answered in the affirmative; but with a Teufelsdrockh
the