Our Philosopher declares here, as indeed we should think he well might,
that these facts, first communicated, by the good Gretchen Futteral, In his
twelfth year, "produced on the boyish heart and fancy a quite indelible
impression. Who this reverend Personage," he says, "that glided into the
Orchard Cottage when the Sun was in Libra, and then, as on spirit's wings,
glided out again, might be? An inexpressible desire, full of love and of
sadness, has often since struggled within me to shape an answer. Ever, in
my distresses and my loneliness, has Fantasy turned, full of longing
(_sehnsuchtsvoll_), to that unknown Father, who perhaps far from me,
perhaps near, either way invisible, might have taken me to his paternal
bosom, there to lie screened from many a woe. Thou beloved Father, dost
thou still, shut out from me only by thin penetrable curtains of earthly
Space, wend to and fro among the crowd of the living? Or art thou hidden
by those far thicker curtains of the Everlasting Night, or rather of the
Everlasting Day, through which my mortal eye and outstretched arms need not
strive to reach? Alas, I know not, and in vain vex myself to know. More
than once, heart-deluded, have I taken for thee this and the other
noble-looking Stranger; and approached him wistfully, with infinite regard;
but he too had to repel me, he too was not thou.

"And yet, O Man born of Woman," cries the Autobiographer, with one of his
sudden whirls, "wherein is my case peculiar? Hadst thou, any more than I,
a Father whom thou knowest? The Andreas and Gretchen, or the Adam and Eve,
who led thee into Life, and for a time suckled and pap-fed thee there, whom
thou namest Father and Mother; these were, like mine, but thy
nursing-father and nursing-mother: thy true Beginning and Father is in
Heaven, whom with the bodily eye thou shalt never behold, but only with the
spiritual....

"The little green veil," adds he, among much similar moralizing, and