You thank me for Teufelsdrockh; how much more ought I to thank you for your hearty, genuine, though extravagant acknowledgment of it!  Blessed is the voice that amid dispiritment, stupidity, and contradiction proclaims to us, Euge! Nothing ever was more ungenial than the soil this poor Teufelsdrockhish seed-corn has been thrown on here; none cries, Good speed to it; the sorriest nettle or hemlock seed, one would think, had been more welcome.  For indeed our British periodical critics, and especially the public of Fraser’s Magazine (which I believe I have now done with), exceed all speech; require not even contempt, only oblivion.  Poor Teufelsdrockh!—­Creature of mischance, miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction!  Here nevertheless he is, as you see; has struggled across the Stygian marshes, and now, as a stitched pamphlet “for Friends,” cannot be burnt or lost before his time.  I send you one copy for your own behoof; three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for:  as you spoke in the plural number, I thought there might be three; more would rather surprise me.  From the British side of the water I have met simply one intelligent response,—­clear, true, though almost enthusiastic as your own.  My British Friend too is utterly a stranger, whose very name I know not, who did not print, but only write, and to an unknown third party.* Shall I say then, “In the mouth of two witnesses”?  In any case, God be thanked, I am done with it; can wash my hands of it, and send it forth; sure that the Devil will get his full share of it, and not a whit more, clutch as he may.  But as for you, my Transoceanic brothers, read this earnestly, for it was earnestly meant and written, and contains no voluntary falsehood of mine.  For the rest, if you dislike it, say that I wrote it four years ago, and could not now so write it, and on the whole (as Fritz the Only said) “will do better another time.”  With regard to style and so forth, what you call your “saucy” objections are not only most intelligible to me, but welcome and instructive.  You say well that I take up that attitude because I have no known public, am alone under the heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly space; add only, that I will not defend such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I, in these mad times, could conveniently hit upon.  For you are to know, my view is that now at last we have lived to see all manner of Poetics and Rhetorics and Sermonics, and one may say generally all manner of Pulpits for addressing mankind from, as good as broken and abolished:  alas, yes! if you have any earnest meaning which demands to be not only listened to, but believed and done, you cannot (at least I cannot) utter it there, but the sound sticks in my throat, as when a solemnity were felt to have become a mummery; and so one leaves the pasteboard coulisses, and three unities, and Blair’s Lectures,