break: too early and too
thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, in this world of
ours, is as mere zero to Should, and for most part as the smallest of
fractions even to Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldly
Discretion, nay of Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my
upbringing. It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded, every
way unscientific: yet in that very strictness and domestic solitude
might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the stem from
which all noble fruit must grow? Above all, how unskilful soever, it was
loving, it was well-meant, honest; whereby every deficiency was helped.
My kind Mother, for as such I must ever love the good Gretchen, did me
one altogether invaluable service: she taught me, less indeed by word
than by act and daily reverent look and habitude, her own simple version
of the Christian Faith. Andreas too attended Church; yet more like
a parade-duty, for which he in the other world expected pay with
arrears,--as, I trust, he has received; but my Mother, with a true
woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was in the strictest
acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the Good grows, and propagates
itself, even among the weedy entanglements of Evil! The highest whom
I knew on Earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a
Higher in Heaven: such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to
the very core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build
itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the
divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelopment of
Fear. Wouldst thou rather be a peasant's son that knew, were it never so
rudely, there was a God in Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only
knew there were two-and-thirty quarters on the family-coach?"

To which last question we must answer: Beware, O Teufelsdrockh, of
spiritual pride!

CHAPTER III. PEDAGOGY.

Hitherto we see young Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellow serge,
borne forward mostly on the arms of kind Nature alone; seated, indeed,
and much to his mind, in the terrestrial workshop, but (except his
soft hazel eyes, which we doubt not already gleamed with a still
intelligence) called upon for little voluntary movement there. Hitherto,
accordingly, his aspect is rather generic, that of an incipient
Philosopher and Poet in the abstract; perhaps it would puzzle Herr
Heuschrecke himself to say wherein t