my own hands sewed into volumes. By this means was the young
head furnished with a considerable miscellany of things and shadows
of things: History in authentic fragments lay mingled with Fabulous
chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the whole not as dead stuff, but
as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive for a mind as yet so peptic."

That the Entepfuhl Schoolmaster judged well, we now know. Indeed,
already in the youthful Gneschen, with all his outward stillness, there
may have been manifest an inward vivacity that promised much; symptoms
of a spirit singularly open, thoughtful, almost poetical. Thus, to say
nothing of his Suppers on the Orchard-wall, and other phenomena of that
earlier period, have many readers of these pages stumbled, in their
twelfth year, on such reflections as the following? "It struck me much,
as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silent noontide, and watched it flowing,
gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had flowed and gurgled,
through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the earliest
date of History. Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua forded Jordan;
even as at the mid-day when Caesar, doubtless with difficulty, swam the
Nile, yet kept his _Commentaries_ dry,--this little Kuhbach, assiduous
as Tiber, Eurotas or Siloa, was murmuring on across the wilderness, as
yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, as in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is
a vein or veinlet of the grand World-circulation of Waters, which, with
its atmospheric arteries, has lasted and lasts simply with the World.
Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that
idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age." In which little
thought, as in a little fountain, may there not lie the beginning of
those well-nigh unutterable meditations on the grandeur and mystery
of TIME, and its relation to ETERNITY, which play such a part in this
Philosophy of Clothes?

Over his Gymnasic and Academic years the Professor by no means lingers
so lyrical and joyful as over his childhood. Green sunny tracts there
are still; but intersected by bitter rivulets of tears, here and there
stagnating into sour marshes of discontent. "With my first view of the
Hinterschlag Gymnasium," writes he, "my evil days began. Well do I still
remember the red sunny Whitsuntide morning, when, trotting full of hope
by the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street of the place,
and saw its steeple-clock (then striking Eight)