ces and terrors of a wild Imagination,
wedded to the clearest Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude.
Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages;
circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, so
often intervene! On the whole, Professor Teufelsdroeckh is not a
cultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths
stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular
attitudes, buttressed-up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and
ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few even
sprawl-out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and
dismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods, there lies
in him a singular attraction. A wild tone pervades the whole utterance
of the man, like its keynote and regulator; now screwing itself aloft
as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill mockery of Fiends; now
sinking in cadences, not without melodious heartiness, though
sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch, when we hear it only
as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremely
difficult to fix. Up to this hour we have never fully satisfied
ourselves whether it is a tone and hum of real Humour, which we reckon
among the very highest qualities of genius, or some echo of mere
Insanity and Inanity, which doubtless ranks below the very lowest.

Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse, do
we still lie with regard to the Professor's moral feeling. Gleams of
an ethereal Love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite pity;
he could clasp the whole Universe into his bosom, and keep it warm; it
seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then
again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such
indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and
ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, if
indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,--that you look on him almost
with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this
great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge
foolish Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and
stars and street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled, in which only
children could take interest. His look, as we mentioned, is probably
the gravest ever seen: yet it is not of that cast-iron gravity
frequent enough among our own Chancery suitors; but rath