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, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the
felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with
shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would
have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself
anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its
thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed
off into the Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been