unsuccessfully, to do his endeavor.

Among the earliest tools of any complicacy which a man, especially a man of
letters, gets to handle, are his Class-books. On this portion of his
History, Teufelsdrockh looks down professedly as indifferent. Reading he
"cannot remember ever to have learned;" so perhaps had it by nature. He
says generally: "Of the insignificant portion of my Education, which
depended on Schools, there need almost no notice be taken. I learned what
others learn; and kept it stored by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet
no manner of use in it. My Schoolmaster, a down-bent, broken-hearted,
underfoot martyr, as others of that guild are, did little for me, except
discover that he could do little: he, good soul, pronounced me a genius,
fit for the learned professions; and that I must be sent to the Gymnasium,
and one day to the University. Meanwhile, what printed thing soever I
could meet with I read. My very copper pocket-money I laid out on
stall-literature; which, as it accumulated, I with my own hands sewed into
volumes. By this means was the young head furnished with a considerable
miscellany of things and shadows of things: History in authentic fragments
lay mingled with Fabulous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the whole
not as dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive for a mind as
yet so peptic."

That the Entepfuhl Schoolmaster judged well, we now know. Indeed, already
in the youthful Gneschen, with all his outward stillness, there may have
been manifest an inward vivacity that promised much; symptoms of a spirit
singularly open, thoughtful, almost poetical. Thus, to say nothing of his
Suppers on the Orchard-wall, and other phenomena of that earlier period,
have many readers of these pages stumbled, in their twelfth year, on such
reflections as the following? "It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach,
one silent noontide, and watched it flowing, gurgling, to think how this