first the master-colours of our Dream-grotto; say rather, the
Canvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and
Life-visions are painted! Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation
taught certain of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so
mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial
terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where
they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not
all nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as
existing in a universal HERE, an everlasting NOW? Think well, thou too
wilt find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise
Time; there _is_ no Space and no Time: WE are--we know not
what;--light-sparkles floating in the aether of Deity!

'So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an
air-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousandfold
production and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force,
the "phantasy of our Dream"; or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names
it, _the living visible Garment of God_:

"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living:
'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."

Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of
the _Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the
meaning thereof?

'It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high
speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strange
enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and
Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the
girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and
the noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his
own bootmaker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the
valleys, with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein
warmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces
also have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of
colour, featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting.
While I--good Heaven!--have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces
of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails