Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/75

CHAP. VIII.] every climate and age, that the and, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the celestial  and : have not all nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in a universal , an everlasting ? Think well, thou too wilt find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there is no Space and no Time: are—we know not what;—light-sparkles floating in the æther of Diety!

'So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our the only reality: and Nature, with its thousandfold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the "phantasy of our Dream"; or what the Earth-Spirit in Faust names it, the living visible Garment of God:

Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the meaning thereof? 'It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strange enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and the noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his own boot-maker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through