To the Author’s private circle the appearance of this singular Work on Clothes must have occasioned little less surprise than it has to the rest of the world. For ourselves, at least, few things have been more unexpected. Professor Teufelsdrockh, at the period of our acquaintance with him, seemed to lead a quite still and self-contained life: a man devoted² to the higher Philosophies, indeed; yet more likely, if he published at all, to publish a refutation of Hegel and Bardili, both of whom, strangely enough, he included under a common ban; than to descend³, as he has here done, into the angry noisy Forum⁴, with an Argument that cannot but exasperate⁵ and divide. Not, that we can remember, was the Philosophy of Clothes once touched upon between us. If through the high, silent, meditative⁶ Transcendentalism of our Friend we detected any practical tendency whatever, it was at most Political, and towards a certain prospective⁷, and for the present quite speculative⁸, Radicalism⁹; as indeed some correspondence, on his part, with Herr Oken of Jena was now and then suspected; though his special contributions to the Isis could never be more than surmised¹⁰ at. But, at all events, nothing Moral, still less anything Didactico–Religious, was looked for from him.

Well do we recollect¹¹ the last words he spoke¹² in our hearing; which indeed, with the Night they were uttered in, are to be forever remembered. Lifting his huge tumbler of Gukguk, 2 and for a moment lowering his tobacco-pipe, he stood up in full Coffee-house (it was Zur Grunen Gans, the largest in Weissnichtwo, where all the

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