the master-colors of our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas
(the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are
painted. Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain
of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously
inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial
adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount
up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not all nations
conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in a
universal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find that
Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there _is_ no
Space and no Time: WE are--we know not what;--light-sparkles floating in
the ether of Deity!

"So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image,
our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousand-fold production
and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasy
of our Dream;' or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names it, _the living
visible Garment of God_:--

"'In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living:
'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.'

Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of
the _Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the
meaning thereof?

"It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high
speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strange
enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and
Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the
girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and the
noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his
own boot-maker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the
valleys, with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein
warmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also
have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of color,
featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting. While
I--good Heaven!--have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of
sheep, the bark of vegetables