nscious? Why, if there is no Devil;
nay, unless the Devil is your God'?

A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as the
worst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a
Teufelsdroeckh threaten to fail? We conjecture that he has known
sickness; and, in spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of
the chronic sort. Hear this, for example: 'How beautiful to die of
broken-heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in practice; every window
of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as it were, begrimed and
mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole Drugshop in
your inwards; the fordone soul drowning slowly in quagmires of
Disgust!'

Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we not
find in the following sentences, quite in our Professor's still vein,
significance enough? 'From Suicide a certain aftershine (_Nachschein_)
of Christianity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indolence of
character; for, was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach?
Often, however, was there a question present to me: Should some one
now, at the turning of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space,
into the other World, or other No-World, by pistol-shot,--how were it?
On which ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged cities
and other death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which passed,
falsely enough, for courage.'

'So had it lasted,' concludes the Wanderer, 'so had it lasted, as in
bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart within
me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous,
slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear;
or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's
Deathsong, that wild _Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet_ (Happy
whom _he_ finds in Battle's splendour), and thought that of this last
Friend even I was not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom me
not to die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it
of Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing,
could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to
me, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely
enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous,
pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all
things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if
the Heavens and the Earth were