Space, wend to and fro among the crowd
of the living? Or art thou hidden by those far thicker curtains of the
Everlasting Night, or rather of the Everlasting Day, through which my
mortal eye and outstretched arms need not strive to reach? Alas, I know
not, and in vain vex myself to know. More than once, heart-deluded,
have I taken for thee this and the other noble-looking Stranger; and
approached him wistfully, with infinite regard; but he too had to repel
me, he too was not thou.

"And yet, O Man born of Woman," cries the Autobiographer, with one of
his sudden whirls, "wherein is my case peculiar? Hadst thou, any more
than I, a Father whom thou knowest? The Andreas and Gretchen, or the
Adam and Eve, who led thee into Life, and for a time suckled and pap-fed
thee there, whom thou namest Father and Mother; these were, like mine,
but thy nursing-father and nursing-mother: thy true Beginning and Father
is in Heaven, whom with the bodily eye thou shalt never behold, but only
with the spiritual....

"The little green veil," adds he, among much similar moralizing, and
embroiled discoursing, "I yet keep; still more inseparably the Name,
Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. From the veil can nothing be inferred: a piece
of now quite faded Persian silk, like thousands of others. On the Name I
have many times meditated and conjectured; but neither in this lay
there any clew. That it was my unknown Father's name I must hesitate to
believe. To no purpose have I searched through all the Herald's
Books, in and without the German Empire, and through all manner
of Subscriber-Lists (_Pranumeranten_), Militia-Rolls, and other
Name-catalogues; extraordinary names as we have in Germany, the name
Teufelsdrockh, except as appended to my own person, nowhere occurs.
Again, what may the unchristian rather than Christian 'Diogenes' mean?
Did that reverend Basket-bearer intend, by such designation, to shadow
forth my future destiny, or his own present malign humor? Perhaps the
latter, perhaps both. Thou ill-starred Parent, who like an Ostrich hadst
to leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatched into self-support by
the mere sky-influences of Chance, can thy pilgrimage have been a smooth
one? Beset by Misfortune thou doubtless hast been; or indeed by the
worst figure of Misfortune, by Misconduct. Often have I fancied how,
in thy hard life-battle, thou wert shot at, and slung at, wounded,
hand-fettered, hamstrung, browbeaten and bedevilled by the Time-Spiri