ore a man thy with ch foolish n act of co repeat n of then on, other eet music. ation and or its own come: it another 's for the r myself, s flood of w he hasa certain l characbecame, ciousness ore than when one ce), after I, symparightly, t's Invo I believe, in absolute vision, would have been a less wonder-working XVIII I have spoken of the master-writers as sove- t 1 the crowd, and climb the high rock, and are not ch by the soul-corroding labour', but gain the summ and the holy throng stands there, and reaches friendly hands, and each accepts the welcome from Master-spirit with whom his own soul is most in munion, and speaks with him awhile apart, and down towards the other labourers on the meadow o strengthened, and perhaps with new aims for his 1 from intercourse with the Immortal; and some sentence of wisdom or melodious counsel that he learned above is on his lips, as he leaps down the crag the many smile as he joins them on the highway, and silent, but carries with him an inner music in his hea his labour. And then, if the youth finds or meet: Desired, his lips are again unsealed, and he teache what he had learned on that lofty place, and she repe to him, and he fails to know the words again, they cochanged from her lips, deepened in their wisdom, musical in their melody, sweeter in their sweetness. XIX But there were other regions, where Dés image only and recollection could accompany me. common repugnance to the studies of school from wh can claim no exemption, never extended itself-I wr with thankfulness-to the books so studied. And pres more familiar conversance with the two great trea languages of antiquity (so unmeaningly termed Clas opened the door to the first comprehension of those writ which are amongst the most powerful of all outwar cumstances in forming the mind; which, awaking answer from our own unexplored and hidden conscious or replying to the questions of the soul, in the str sense perform the work of Education. Now first, as i South we gaze, a week's journey distant, on some t checked ummit,es them From that in comand goes w of life is labour ! me great he has Crag; and and he is heart to eets the ches her repeats it 7 come so S. m, more Désirée's e. That which I write it resently, Creasure Classical) writings, vard cir King an ousness, strictest s in the me vast mountain whose name alone has magic, and are startled to apparet divum numen sedesque quietae, quas neque concutiunt venti nec nubila nimbis cana cadens violat, semperque innubilus aether But I was as yet an ignorant, a timid, a distant wor- 6 XX Gleams, however, of that untravelled world' now began to break on me through the story of Ulysses; and as I read of Ajax, Oedipus, and Antigone, and compared these images with the marbles of the Parthenon or with engravings from Raphael which through access to a vast collection now became known to me, the grace, and truth, and hidden heat of Athenian passion were gradually revealed. Ovid's Fasti',- those nursery tales of Rome told by an incredulous poet in his most choice and finished verse, deepened the impression of the mysterious ancient world; of the vast strata of forgotten faith and practice (and I know few lessons of the past, if any, more solemnly and pathetically instructive), which, like the deep leaf mould of aboriginal forests, underlie, feed, and at incorporate the proud foliage of the passing summer. this impression was partial and imaginative: a foretast dim earnest, or at most a gleam 'like the flashing o 'shield', whilst the human form that bore it was hidd From the fragments in which, by a common but injudici school arrangement, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Livy w studied, I learned little it is, I think, only when read their continuity, and in more experienced years, that th great histories properly seize on the mind. Cicero's phi sophical works, the shorter essays especially, convey almost the pleasure of poetry by the vague largeness of thought, the sweetness and latter-day humanity of t moral sentiments, the fine cadences and balanced amplitu of the style. Yet my profit in these studies was lessen by a perversity or narrowness of view from which my co panions were free. For, influenced by some foolish fand I hardly know whence derived, in all ancient works endeavoured to trace foreshadowings of Christian religio feeling, or presumptuously contrasted what I imagined t imperfect morality and half-vision of poets and philosophe with the better things of the middle or modern age Thus Plato and Lucretius were for some years (I note it a warning to any youthful and sympathetic reader) re dered useless to me by a boy's weak vanity. Their maste works fared as an ancient statue among children, chipp and dishonoured one day, the next decorated with to and dressed up in finery: I christianized the one, ar anathematized the other. A translation of Aristotle Nikomachean Ethics, drawn forth one morning from corner of my father's library, first broke these clouds little. That great lordly morality, presented in a form s severe and dissimilar even from Cicero's treatment, in at last -. But taste, a ng of a hidden. dicious y were read in t these philonveyed of the of the litude ssened 7 com fancy, orks I igious d the phers ages. it as ren aster ipped toys and otle's om a ds a m so im pressed the boy with a vague sense of incomprehensible awe: a blind reverence. Amongst these Titanic shapes of Virtue and of Vice, ranked in vast series by Aristotle's scientific method, and converging to the high vision of Theoretic Happiness, I felt like a child wandering through the Sphynx avenue of Thebes, and putting questions to Memnon. XXI But the most heartsome and the most continuous delight I then owed to Virgil: a debt so deep, that if any consciousness of mortal things and our weak words is felt in Elysian Fields, 'si qua est ea gloria', I would willingly discharge a portion now, by an earnest, a fervent expression of revering thankfulness. I should not indeed have taken arms for him, had 'Odyssey' and 'Aeneid' been at any time the banners or battle-cries of our schoolboy warfaring, for Homer was the greater and more inspiring God; yet many causes made Virgil the closer cherished favourite, the playing-field and fireside darling. His language was the more comprehensible; his art (an excellence earlier appreciated by boys, from their narrow practical experience, than the larger nature of Homer) far more constantly and sensibly present; and his poems, Bucolica and Georgica in particular, richer in the single lines and jewels five'words-long', which the reader seems able to appropriate and carry off, a personal property: like the carved fragments travellers bear away from Rome, or the flowers presented for remembrance as they leave the Doria Gardens of Genoa. Virgil's combats, again, and games,—and not less the morality pervading the sixth book of his Epic,— are distinctively modern compared with Homer's; they touch a child more readily. From my own recollections, indeed, I might justly say, that to boyhood, so favoured in its exemption from critical |