efore thee? Death? Well, Death:
and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may,
will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a Heart; canst thou not
suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast,
trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it
come, then; I will meet it and defy it!"

This is no permanent or stable resting-place, but it is the beginning of
much. It is the assertion of self in indignation and wild defiance,
instead of the former misery of a man merely haunted by himself. This is
that "Baphometic Fire-baptism" or new-birth of spiritual awakening,
which is the beginning of true manhood. The Everlasting No had said:
"Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the
Devil's); to which my whole Me now made answer: I am not thine, but
Free, and forever hate thee!"

The immediate result of this awakening is told in "Centre of
Indifference"--_i.e._, indifference to oneself, one's own feelings, and
even to fate. It is the transition from subjective to objective
interests, from eating one's own heart out to a sense of the wide and
living world by which one is surrounded. It is the same process which,
just about this time, Robert Browning was describing in _Paracelsus_ and
_Sordello_. Once more Teufelsdroeckh travels, but this time how
differently! Instead of being absorbed by the haunting shadow of
himself, he sees the world full of vital interests--cities of men,
tilled fields, books, battlefields. The great questions of the
world--the true meanings alike of peace and war--claim his interest. The
great men, whether Goethe or Napoleon, do their work before his
astonished eyes. "Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals,
look away from his own sorrows, over the many-coloured world, and
pertinently enough note what is passing there." He has
reached--strangely enough through self-assertion--the centre of
indifference to self, and of interest in other people and things. And
the supreme lesson of it all is the value of _efficiency_. Napoleon "was
a Divine Missionary, though unconscious of it; and preached, through the
cannon's throat, that great doctrine, _La carriere ouverte aux talens_
(the tools to him that can handle them)."

This bracing doctrine carries us at once into The Everlasting Yea. It is
not enough that a man pass from the morbid and self-centered mood to an
interest in the outward world that surrounds him. That