tish Brass-smith's IDEA (and this but a mechanical one) travelling
on fire-wings round the Cape, and across two Oceans; and stronger than
any other Enchanter's Familiar, on all hands unweariedly fetching
and carrying: at home, not only weaving Cloth; but rapidly enough
overturning the whole old system of Society; and, for Feudalism and
Preservation of the Game, preparing us, by indirect but sure methods,
Industrialism and the Government of the Wisest? Truly a Thinking Man is
the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such a one
announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through the
Nether Empire; and new Emissaries are trained, with new tactics, to, if
possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him.

"With such high vocation had I too, as denizen of the Universe,
been called. Unhappy it is, however, that though born to the amplest
Sovereignty, in this way, with no less than sovereign right of Peace
and War against the Time-Prince (_Zeitfurst_), or Devil, and all his
Dominions, your coronation-ceremony costs such trouble, your sceptre is
so difficult to get at, or even to get eye on!"

By which last wire-drawn similitude does Teufelsdrockh mean no more than
that young men find obstacles in what we call "getting under way"? "Not
what I Have," continues he, "but what I Do is my Kingdom. To each is
given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune;
to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of
Capability. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by
study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined
inward and outward Capability specially is. For, alas, our young soul is
all budding with Capabilities, and we see not yet which is the main and
true one. Always too the new man is in a new time, under new conditions;
his course can be the _fac-simile_ of no prior one, but is by its
nature original. And then how seldom will the outward Capability fit
the inward: though talented wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended,
dyspeptical, bashful; nay what is worse than all, we are foolish. Thus,
in a whole imbroglio of Capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to
grope which is ours, and often clutch the wrong one: in this mad work
must several years of our small term be spent, till the purblind Youth,
by practice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing Man. Nay,
many so spend their whole term, and in ever-new expect