manifest itself; and, across
all the hulls of Ignorance and earthly Degradation, shine through, in
unspeakable Awfulness, unspeakable Beauty, on their souls: who
therefore are rightly accounted Prophets, God-possessed; or even Gods,
as in some periods it has chanced. Sitting in his stall; working on
tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a
nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had, nevertheless, a Living
Spirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through
which, as through a window, it could look upwards, and discern its
celestial Home. The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled even with
some prospect of victuals, and an honourable Mastership in
Cordwainery, and perhaps the post of Thirdborough in his hundred, as
the crown of long faithful sewing,--was nowise satisfaction enough to
such a mind: but ever amid the boring and hammering came tones from
that far country, came Splendours and Terrors; for this poor
Cordwainer, as we said, was a Man; and the Temple of Immensity,
wherein as Man he had been sent to minister, was full of holy mystery
to him.

'The Clergy of the neighbourhood, the ordained Watchers and
Interpreters of that same holy mystery, listened with unaffected
tedium to his consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such
doubts, to "drink beer and dance with the girls." Blind leaders of the
blind! For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what were
their shovel-hats scooped-out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons
girt-on; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing,
and other racketing, held over that spot of God's Earth,--if Man were
but a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand
Reality? Fox turned from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to
his Leather-parings and his Bible. Mountains of encumbrance, higher
than AEtna, had been heaped over that Spirit: but it was a Spirit, and
would not lie buried there. Through long days and nights of silent
agony, it struggled and wrestled, with a man's force, to be free: how
its prison-mountains heaved and swayed tumultuously, as the giant
spirit shook them to this hand and that, and emerged into the light of
Heaven! That Leicester shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place
than any Vatican or Loretto-shrine.--"So bandaged, and hampered, and
hemmed in," groaned he, "with thousand requisitions, obligations,
straps, tatters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor mov