same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and
of fortune, from beyond the earliest date of History. Yes, probably on the
morning when Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the mid-day when Caesar,
doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his _Commentaries_
dry,--this little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas or Siloa, was
murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, as
in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein or veinlet of the grand
World-circulation of Waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, has
lasted and lasts simply with the World. Thou fool! Nature alone is
antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is
six thousand years of age." In which little thought, as in a little
fountain, may there not lie the beginning of those well-nigh unutterable
meditations on the grandeur and mystery of TIME, and its relation to
ETERNITY, which play such a part in this Philosophy of Clothes?

Over his Gymnasic and Academic years the Professor by no means lingers so
lyrical and joyful as over his childhood. Green sunny tracts there are
still; but intersected by bitter rivulets of tears, here and there
stagnating into sour marshes of discontent. "With my first view of the
Hinterschlag Gymnasium," writes he, "my evil days began. Well do I still
remember the red sunny Whitsuntide morning, when, trotting full of hope by
the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street of the place, and saw
its steeple-clock (then striking Eight) and _Schuldthurm_ (Jail), and the
aproned or disaproned Burghers moving in to breakfast: a little dog, in
mad terror, was rushing past; for some human imps had tied a tin kettle to
its tail; thus did the agonized creature, loud-jingling, career through the
whole length of the Borough, and become notable enough. Fit emblem of many
a Conquering Hero, to whom Fate (wedding Fantasy to Sense, as it often
elsewhere does) has malignantly appended a tin kettle of Ambition, to chase
him on; which the faster he runs, urges him the faster, the more loudly and