connects us with a possible Higher
State, and sets us in progress towards it,--we have a cycle of thoughts
which was the whole spiritual empire of the wisest Pagans, and which
might well supply food for the wide speculations and richly creative
fancy of Teufelsdrockh, or his prototype Jean Paul.

"How then comes it, we cannot but ask, that these ideas, displayed
assuredly with no want of eloquence, vivacity or earnestness, have
found, unless I am much mistaken, so little acceptance among the best
and most energetic minds in this country? In a country where millions
read the Bible, and thousands Shakspeare; where Wordsworth circulates
through book-clubs and drawing-rooms; where there are innumerable
admirers of your favorite Burns; and where Coleridge, by sending from
his solitude the voice of earnest spiritual instruction, came to be
beloved, studied and mourned for, by no small or careless school of
disciples?--To answer this question would, of course, require more
thought and knowledge than I can pretend to bring to it. But there are
some points on which I will venture to say a few words.

"In the first place, as to the form of composition,--which may be
called, I think, the Rhapsodico-Reflective. In this the _Sartor
Resartus_ resembles some of the master-works of human invention, which
have been acknowledged as such by many generations; and especially the
works of Rabelais, Montaigne, Sterne and Swift. There is nothing I
know of in Antiquity like it. That which comes nearest is perhaps the
Platonic Dialogue. But of this, although there is something of the
playful and fanciful on the surface, there is in reality neither in the
language (which is austerely determined to its end), nor in the method
and progression of the work, any of that headlong self-asserting
capriciousness, which, if not discernible in the plan of Teufelsdrockh's
Memoirs, is yet plainly to be seen in the structure of the sentences,
the lawless oddity, and strange heterogeneous combination and allusion.
The principle of this difference, observable often elsewhere in modern
literature (for the same thing is to be found, more or less, in many of
our most genial works of imagination,--_Don Quixote_, for instance, and
the writings of Jeremy Taylor), seems to be that well-known one of the
predominant objectivity of the Pagan mind; while among us the subjective
has risen into superiority, and brought with it in each individual
a multitude of peculiar asso