to us!  Me, however, as a Son of Time, unhappier than some others, was Time threatening to eat quite prematurely; for, strive as I might, there was no good Running, so obstructed was the path, so gyved were the feet.”  That is to say, we presume, speaking in the dialect of this lower world, that Teufelsdrockh’s whole duty and necessity was, like other men’s, “to work,—­in the right direction,” and that no work was to be had; whereby he became wretched enough.  As was natural:  with haggard Scarcity threatening him in the distance; and so vehement a soul languishing in restless inaction, and forced thereby, like Sir Hudibras’s sword by rust,

     “To eat into itself, for lack
     Of something else to hew and hack;”

But on the whole, that same “excellent Passivity,” as it has all along done, is here again vigorously flourishing; in which circumstance may we not trace the beginnings of much that now characterizes our Professor and perhaps, in faint rudiments, the origin of the Clothes-Philosophy itself?  Already the attitude he has assumed towards the World is too defensive; not, as would have been desirable, a bold attitude of attack.  “So far hitherto,” he says, “as I had mingled with mankind, I was notable, if for anything, for a certain stillness of manner, which, as my friends often rebukingly declared, did but ill express the keen ardor of my feelings.  I, in truth, regarded men with an excess both of love and of fear.  The mystery of a Person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the Godlike.  Often, notwithstanding, was I blamed, and by half-strangers hated, for my so-called Hardness (Harte), my Indifferentism towards men; and the seemingly ironic tone I had adopted, as my favorite dialect in conversation.  Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm was but as a buckram case, wherein I had striven to envelop myself; that so my own poor Person might live safe there, and in all friendliness, being no longer exasperated by wounds.  Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.  But how many individuals did I, in those days, provoke into some degree of hostility thereby!  An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambuscading ways, more especially an ironic young man, from whom it is least expected, may be viewed as a pest to society.  Have we not seen persons of weight and name coming forward, with gentlest indifference, to tread such a one out of sight, as an insignificancy and worm, start ceiling-high (balkenhock), and thence fall shattered and supine, to be borne home on shutters, not without indignation, when he proved electric and a torpedo!”