art remains, for the
while, in a quiet but no comfortable state.

'At length, after so much roasting,' thus writes our Autobiographer,
'I was what you might name calcined. Pray only that it be not rather,
as is the more frequent issue, reduced to a _caput-mortuum_! But in
any case, by mere dint of practice, I had grown familiar with many
things. Wretchedness was still wretched; but I could now partly see
through it, and despise it. Which highest mortal, in this inane
Existence, had I not found a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted; and,
when I looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough? Thy
wishes have all been sniffed aside, thought I: but what, had they even
been all granted! Did not the Boy Alexander weep because he had not
two Planets to conquer; or a whole Solar System; or after that, a
whole Universe? _Ach Gott_, when I gazed into these Stars, have they
not looked down on me as if with pity, from their serene spaces; like
Eyes glistening with heavenly tears over the little lot of man!
Thousands of human generations, all as noisy as our own, have been
swallowed-up of Time, and there remains no wreck of them any more; and
Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining in
their courses, clear and young, as when the Shepherd first noted them
in the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry little Dog-cage of
an Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? Thou art still
Nothing, Nobody: true; but who, then, is Something, Somebody? For thee
the Family of Man has no use; it rejects thee; thou art wholly as a
dissevered limb: so be it; perhaps it is better so!'

Too-heavy-laden Teufelsdroeckh! Yet surely his bands are loosening; one
day he will hurl the burden far from him, and bound forth free and
with a second youth.

'This,' says our Professor, 'was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now
reached; through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the
Positive must necessarily pass.'

CHAPTER IX

THE EVERLASTING YEA

'Temptations in the Wilderness!' exclaims Teufelsdroeckh: 'Have we not
all to be tried with such? Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged in
us by birth, be dispossessed. Our Life is compassed round with
Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom,
than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning,
especially, a hard-fought battle. For the God-given mandate, _Work
thou in Welldoing_, lies mysteriously written, in Promethean