al power external to him and dominant
to a certain extent over him, and does not think that he is himself a
shadow in a world of shadows. He had a deep feeling of the beautiful,
the good and the true; and a faith in their final victory.

"At the same time, how evident is the strong inward unrest, the Titanic
heaving of mountain on mountain; the storm-like rushing over land and
sea in search of peace. He writhes and roars under his consciousness
of the difference in himself between the possible and the actual, the
hoped-for and the existent. He feels that duty is the highest law of
his own being; and knowing how it bids the waves be stilled into an
icy fixedness and grandeur, he trusts (but with a boundless inward
misgiving) that there is a principle of order which will reduce all
confusion to shape and clearness. But wanting peace himself, his fierce
dissatisfaction fixes on all that is weak, corrupt and imperfect around
him; and instead of a calm and steady co-operation with all those who
are endeavoring to apply the highest ideas as remedies for the worst
evils, he holds himself aloof in savage isolation; and cherishes (though
he dare not own) a stern joy at the prospect of that Catastrophe which
is to turn loose again the elements of man's social life, and give for
a time the victory to evil;--in hopes that each new convulsion of the
world must bring us nearer to the ultimate restoration of all things;
fancying that each may be the last. Wanting the calm and cheerful
reliance, which would be the spring of active exertion, he flatters his
own distemper by persuading himself that his own age and generation
are peculiarly feeble and decayed; and would even perhaps be willing
to exchange the restless immaturity of our self-consciousness, and
the promise of its long throe-pangs, for the unawakened undoubting
simplicity of the world's childhood; of the times in which there was all
the evil and horror of our day, only with the difference that conscience
had not arisen to try and condemn it. In these longings, if they are
Teufelsdrockh's, he seems to forget that, could we go back five thousand
years, we should only have the prospect of travelling them again, and
arriving at last at the same point at which we stand now.

"Something of this state of mind I may say that I understand; for I have
myself experienced it. And the root of the matter appears to me: A want
of sympathy with the great body of those who are now endeavorin