pling, as I conjecture, there already
blooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve;
nor, in the stately vistas, and flowerage and foliage of that Garden,
is a Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof,
wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier, if Cherubim and a
Flaming Sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant him, the
imaginative stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy season
of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestial
barrier; and the sacred air-cities of Hope have not shrunk into the
mean clay-hamlets of Reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite
and free!

'As for our young Forlorn,' continues Teufelsdroeckh, evidently meaning
himself, 'in his secluded way of life, and with his glowing Fantasy,
the more fiery that it burnt under cover, as in a reverberating
furnace, his feeling towards the Queens of this Earth was, and indeed
is, altogether unspeakable. A visible Divinity dwelt in them; to our
young Friend all women were holy, were heavenly. As yet he but saw
them flitting past, in their many-coloured angel-plumage; or hovering
mute and inaccessible on the outskirts of _AEsthetic Tea_: all of air
they were, all Soul and Form; so lovely, like mysterious priestesses,
in whose hand was the invisible Jacob's-ladder, whereby man might
mount into very Heaven. That he, our poor Friend, should ever win for
himself one of these Gracefuls (_Holden_)--_Ach Gott!_ how could he
hope it; should he not have died under it? There was a certain
delirious vertigo in the thought.

'Thus was the young man, if all-sceptical of Demons and Angels such as
the vulgar had once believed in, nevertheless not unvisited by hosts
of true Sky-born, who visibly and audibly hovered round him whereso he
went; and they had that religious worship in his thought, though as
yet it was by their mere earthly and trivial name that he named them.
But now, if on a soul so circumstanced, some actual Air-maiden,
incorporated into tangibility and reality, should cast any electric
glance of kind eyes, saying thereby, "Thou too mayest love and be
loved"; and so kindle him,--good Heaven, what a volcanic,
earthquake-bringing, all-consuming fire were probably kindled!'

Such a fire, it afterwards appears, did actually burst-forth, with
explosions more or less Vesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes;
as indeed how could it fail? A nature, which, in his own figurative