and how, in Germany as
elsewhere, the ninety-and-nine Public Men can for most part be but mute
train-bearers to the hundredth, perhaps but stalking-horses and willing
or unwilling dupes,--it might have seemed wonderful how Herr Heuschrecke
should be named a _Rath_, or Councillor, and Counsellor, even in
Weissnichtwo. What counsel to any man, or to any woman, could this
particular Hofrath give; in whose loose, zigzag figure; in whose
thin visage, as it went jerking to and fro, in minute incessant
fluctuation,--you traced rather confusion worse confounded; at most,
Timidity and physical Cold? Some indeed said withal, he was "the
very Spirit of Love embodied:" blue earnest eyes, full of sadness and
kindness; purse ever open, and so forth; the whole of which, we shall
now hope, for many reasons, was not quite groundless. Nevertheless
friend Teufelsdrockh's outline, who indeed handled the burin like few
in these cases, was probably the best: _Er hat Gemuth und Geist,
hat wenigstens gehabt, doch ohne Organ, ohne Schicksals-Gunst; ist
gegenwartig aber halb-zerruttet, halb-erstarrt_, "He has heart and
talent, at least has had such, yet without fit mode of utterance, or
favor of Fortune; and so is now half-cracked, half-congealed."--What
the Hofrath shall think of this when he sees it, readers may wonder; we,
safe in the stronghold of Historical Fidelity, are careless.

The main point, doubtless, for us all, is his love of Teufelsdrockh,
which indeed was also by far the most decisive feature of Heuschrecke
himself. We are enabled to assert that he hung on the Professor with the
fondness of a Boswell for his Johnson. And perhaps with the like return;
for Teufelsdrockh treated his gaunt admirer with little outward regard,
as some half-rational or altogether irrational friend, and at best loved
him out of gratitude and by habit. On the other hand, it was curious to
observe with what reverent kindness, and a sort of fatherly protection,
our Hofrath, being the elder, richer, and as he fondly imagined far
more practically influential of the two, looked and tended on his
little Sage, whom he seemed to consider as a living oracle. Let but
Teufelsdrockh open his mouth, Heuschrecke's also unpuckered itself into
a free doorway, besides his being all eye and all ear, so that nothing
might be lost: and then, at every pause in the harangue, he gurgled out
his pursy chuckle of a cough-laugh (for the machinery of laughter took
some time to get