bestrapped and bebooted, bearing Joy and Sorrow bagged up in pouches
of leather: there, top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls in the
country Baron and his household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier
hops painfully along, begging alms: a thousand carriages, and wains,
cars, come tumbling in with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw
Produce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out again with produce
manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all
qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is
going? _Aus der Ewigkeit, zu der Ewigkeit hin_: From Eternity, onwards
to Eternity! These are Apparitions: what else? Are they not Souls
rendered visible: in Bodies, that took shape and will lose it, melting
into air? Their solid Pavement is a Picture of the Sense; they walk
on the bosom of Nothing, blank Time is behind them and before them. Or
fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes-screen yonder, with spurs
on its heels and feather in its crown, is but of To-day, without a
Yesterday or a To-morrow; and had not rather its Ancestor alive when
Hengst and Horsa overran thy Island? Friend, thou seest here a living
link in that Tissue of History, which inweaves all Being: watch well, or
it will be past thee, and seen no more."

"_Ach, mein Lieber_!" said he once, at midnight, when we had returned
from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to
dwell here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and
thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night,
what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith
in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when
Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still
rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to
Halls roofed in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice
and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad: that hum,
I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in
Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions,
and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid!
The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are
being born; men are praying,--on the other side of a brick partition,
men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud
Grandee still lingers in his perfumed sal