, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy turns;
all the graces and terrors of a wild Imagination, wedded to the clearest
Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer
sleeping and soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches
even of pure doting jargon, so often intervene! On the whole, Professor
Teufelsdrockh, is not a cultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not
more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are
in quite angular attitudes, buttressed up by props (of parentheses and
dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a
few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and
dismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods, there lies in
him a singular attraction. A wild tone pervades the whole utterance of
the man, like its keynote and regulator; now screwing itself aloft as
into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill mockery of Fiends; now
sinking in cadences, not without melodious heartiness, though sometimes
abrupt enough, into the common pitch, when we hear it only as a
monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremely difficult
to fix. Up to this hour we have never fully satisfied ourselves whether
it is a tone and hum of real Humor, which we reckon among the very
highest qualities of genius, or some echo of mere Insanity and Inanity,
which doubtless ranks below the very lowest.

Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse, do
we still lie with regard to the Professor's moral feeling. Gleams of an
ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite pity;
he could clasp the whole Universe into his bosom, and keep it warm; it
seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then
again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such
indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and
ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humor, if
indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,--that you look on him almost
with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great
terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish
Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and
street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled, in which only children could
take interest. His look, as we mentioned, is probably the gravest ever
seen: yet it is not of that cast-iron gravit