als, and then in the most enigmatic manner.

Whole fascicles there are, wherein the Professor, or, as he here,
speaking in the third person, calls himself, "the Wanderer," is not once
named. Then again, amidst what seems to be a Metaphysico-theological
Disquisition, "Detached Thoughts on the Steam-engine," or, "The
continued Possibility of Prophecy," we shall meet with some quite
private, not unimportant Biographical fact. On certain sheets stand
Dreams, authentic or not, while the circumjacent waking Actions are
omitted. Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, fly loosely
on separate slips, like Sibylline leaves. Interspersed also are long
purely Autobiographical delineations; yet without connection, without
recognizable coherence; so unimportant, so superfluously minute, they
almost remind us of "P.P. Clerk of this Parish." Thus does famine of
intelligence alternate with waste. Selection, order, appears to be
unknown to the Professor. In all Bags the same imbroglio; only perhaps
in the Bag _Capricorn_, and those near it, the confusion a little
worse confounded. Close by a rather eloquent Oration, "On receiving the
Doctor's-Hat," lie wash-bills, marked _bezahlt_ (settled). His Travels
are indicated by the Street-Advertisements of the various cities he has
visited; of which Street-Advertisements, in most living tongues, here is
perhaps the completest collection extant.

So that if the Clothes-Volume itself was too like a Chaos, we have now
instead of the solar Luminary that should still it, the airy Limbo which
by intermixture will farther volatilize and discompose it! As we shall
perhaps see it our duty ultimately to deposit these Six Paper-Bags in
the British Museum, farther description, and all vituperation of them,
may be spared. Biography or Autobiography of Teufelsdrockh there is,
clearly enough, none to be gleaned here: at most some sketchy,
shadowy fugitive likeness of him may, by unheard-of efforts, partly of
intellect, partly of imagination, on the side of Editor and of Reader,
rise up between them. Only as a gaseous-chaotic Appendix to that
aqueous-chaotic Volume can the contents of the Six Bags hover round us,
and portions thereof be incorporated with our delineation of it.

Daily and nightly does the Editor sit (with green spectacles)
deciphering these unimaginable Documents from their perplexed
_cursiv-schrift_; collating them with the almost equally unimaginable
Volume, which stands in legibl