ir sort! "Eccovi l'uom ch'e stato all'Inferno."
For in fine, as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with
sheer Madness, all the way,--who is by no means pleasant company!
You look fixedly into Madness, and her undiscovered, boundless,
bottomless Night-empire; that you may extort new Wisdom out of
it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus. The higher the Wisdom, the
closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere Insanity;
literally so;--and thou wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe
how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this world, has oftentimes
carried such tinctures and adhesions of Insanity still cleaving
to it hither!

All Works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness sane;--
truly enough a religious operation; which cannot be carried on
without religion. You have not work otherwise; you have eye-
service, greedy grasping of wages, swift and ever swifter
manufacture of semblances to get hold of wages. Instead of
better felt-hats to cover your head, you have bigger lath-and-
plaster hats set traveling the streets on wheels. Instead of
heavenly and earthly Guidance for the souls of men, you have
'Black or White Surplice' Controversies, stuffed hair-and-leather
Popes;--terrestrial _Law-wards,_ Lords and Law-bringers,
'organising Labour' in these years, by passing Corn-Laws. With
all which, alas, this distracted Earth is now full, nigh to
bursting. Semblances most smooth to the touch and eye; most
accursed nevertheless to body and soul. Semblances, be they of
Sham-woven Cloth or of Dilettante Legislation, which are _not_
real wool or substance, but Devil's-dust, accursed of God and
man! No man has worked, or can work, except religiously; not
even the poor day-labourer, the weaver of your coat, the sewer of
your shoes. All men, if they work not as in a Great Taskmaster's
eye, will work wrong, work unhappily for themselves and you.

Industrial work, still under bondage to Mammon, the rational soul
of it not yet awakened, is a tragic spectacle. Men in the
rapidest motion and self-motion; restless, with convulsive
energy, as if driven by Galvanism, as if possessed by a Devil;
tearing asunder mountains,--to no purpose, for Mammonism is
always Midas-eared! This is sad, on the face of it. Yet
courage: the beneficent Destinies, kind in their sternness, are
apprising us that this cannot continue. Labour is not a devil,
even while encased in Mammonism; Labour is ever an imprisoned
god, wr