that encompasses and owns us and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of such a spirit as revealed by the visible world’s course, that this particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle reside. Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal “Sartor Resartus” entitled The Everlasting No. “I lived,” writes poor Teufelsdröckh, “in a continual indefinite pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless Jaws of a devouring Monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured.”
This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have this sort of melancholy, no man that is irreligious can
