But to investigate the connection at these and other points between the mere externals of the two careers is a matter of little more than curious interest.

It is because it incorporates and reproduces so much of Carlyle's inner history that the story of Teufelsdroeckh is really important.

Spiritually considered, the whole narrative is, in fact, a "symbolic myth," in which the writer's personal trials and conflicts are depicted with little change save in setting and accessories.

Like Teufelsdroeckh, Carlyle while still a young man had broken away from the old religious creed in which he had been bred; like Teufelsdroeckh, he had thereupon passed into the "howling desert of infidelity;" like Teufelsdroeckh, he had known all the agonies and anguish of a long period of blank scepticism and insurgent despair, during which, turn whither he would, life responded with nothing but negations to every question and appeal.

And as to Teufelsdroeckh in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer in Paris, so to Carlyle in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, there had come a moment of sudden and marvellous illumination, a mystical crisis from which he had emerged a different man.