starting in hot haste to join him, for breakfast on the Heath. Or to see
them at eventide, all marching in again, with short squeak, almost in
military order; and each, topographically correct, trotting off in
succession to the right or left, through its own lane, to its own dwelling;
till old Kunz, at the Village-head, now left alone, blew his last blast,
and retired for the night. We are wont to love the Hog chiefly in the form
of Ham; yet did not these bristly thick-skinned beings here manifest
intelligence, perhaps humor of character; at any rate, a touching, trustful
submissiveness to Man,--who, were he but a Swineherd, in darned gabardine,
and leather breeches more resembling slate or discolored-tin breeches, is
still the Hierarch of this lower world?"

It is maintained, by Helvetius and his set, that an infant of genius is
quite the same as any other infant, only that certain surprisingly
favorable influences accompany him through life, especially through
childhood, and expand him, while others lie close-folded and continue
dunces. Herein, say they, consists the whole difference between an
inspired Prophet and a double-barrelled Game-preserver: the inner man of
the one has been fostered into generous development; that of the other,
crushed down perhaps by vigor of animal digestion, and the like, has exuded
and evaporated, or at best sleeps now irresuscitably stagnant at the bottom
of his stomach. "With which opinion," cries Teufelsdrockh, "I should as
soon agree as with this other, that an acorn might, by favorable or
unfavorable influences of soil and climate, be nursed into a cabbage, or
the cabbage-seed into an oak.

"Nevertheless," continues he, "I too acknowledge the all-but omnipotence of
early culture and nurture: hereby we have either a doddered dwarf bush, or
a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree; either a sick yellow cabbage, or an
edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it is the duty of all men,