of temper.

Upon this exaggerated and most disagreeable period, lit by "red streaks
of unspeakable grandeur, yet also in the blackness of darkness," there
comes suddenly the master passion of romantic love. Had this adventure
proved successful, we should have simply had the old story, which ends
in "so they lived happily ever after." What the net result of all the
former strivings after truth and freedom would have been, we need not
inquire. For this is another story, equally old and to the end of time
ever newly repeated. There is much of Werther in it, and still more of
Jean Paul Richter. Its finest English counterpart is Longfellow's
_Hyperion_--the most beautiful piece of our literature, surely, that has
ever been forgotten--in which Richter's story lives again. But never has
the tale been more exquisitely told than in _Sartor Resartus_. For one
sweet hour of life the youth has been taken out of himself and pale
doubt flees far away. Life, that has been but a blasted heath, blooms
suddenly with unheard-of blossoms of hope and of delight. Then comes the
end. "Their lips were joined, their two souls, like two dewdrops, rushed
into one,--for the first time, and for the last! Thus was Teufelsdroeckh
made immortal by a Kiss. And then? Why, then--thick curtains of Night
rushed over his soul, as rose the immeasurable Crash of Doom; and
through the ruins as of a shivered Universe was he falling, falling,
towards the Abyss."

The sorrows of Teufelsdroeckh are but too well known. Flung back upon his
former dishevelment of mind from so great and calm a height, the crash
must necessarily be terrible. Yet he will not take up his life where he
left it to follow Blumine. Such an hour inevitably changes a man, for
better or for worse. There is at least a dignity about him now, even
while the "nameless Unrest" urges him forward through his darkened
world. The scenes of his childhood in the little Entepfuhl bring no
consolation. Nature, even in his wanderings among her mountains, is
equally futile, for the wanderer can never escape from his own shadow
among her solitudes. Yet is his nature not dissolved, but only
"compressed closer," as it were, and we watch the next stage of this
development with a sense that some mysteriously great and splendid
experience is on the eve of being born.

Thus we come to those three central chapters--chapters so fundamental
and so true to human life, that it is safe to prophesy that they will be
fam