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I believe,

in absolute vision, would have been a less wonder-working
Presence to me than those two brief stanzas of unearthly
music. Like a new colour, they seized the mind's eye, and
for days haunted my recollection:-they seemed to endow
me with a fresh sense: they were an authentic spell, un-
veiling secrets of melody and majesty far beyond those
even which the story ascribed to their talismanic virtue.
On the fairy realm thus opened with a word I entered in
the confidence of youth. Dante in the 'Commedia' and
lyrical poems, Scott in the 'Bride of Lammermoor', Spenser
in his songs of impassioned regret or triumph,' Epithala-
'mium' and 'Daphnaida', Shakspeare in the Sonnets-each
appeared either with me in actual personality, or by a
contrary mode of identification, what I read had been,
somehow, far off, when or where I knew not, my own crea-
tion or experience. Thus I triumphed, thinking at each
splendid line of these sacred singers in prose or verse, I
had gathered a new jewel to offer Désirée; and when we
met (now, as already noticed, for the time less frequently)
shared treasures with her, to find them thenceforward
shining with a twofold glory, consecrated with a special
tenderness. They seemed hers henceforth; I could have
affirmed she had taught them me.

XVIII I have spoken of the master-writers as sove-
reigns each over his own separate star. But we may con-
ceive them, also a glorious company, such as Dante met in
the emerald meadow,-men of more than our stature, and
bearing on their faces the calm of an immortal sadness,
and the smiles of eternal delight. Below the high rock on
which, as one of themselves long ago sang, they stand
around Excellence, they see men contending in the un-
profitable strife or traversing the dusty highways of earth:
but sometimes a few, and chiefly the young, strike off from

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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

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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
see the terror of sharp precipice and torn glacier, and
the tranquil summit itself, so near us, and yet a hundred
miles of crystalline silence between, and the sight lures
us onwards—the power of the Gods of Greece far off
shone out on me, and their serene dwelling-places:

apparet divum numen sedesque quietae,

quas neque concutiunt venti nec nubila nimbis
aspergunt, neque nix acri concreta pruina

cana cadens violat, semperque innubilus aether
integit, et large diffuso lumine ridet.

But I was as yet an ignorant, a timid, a distant wor-
shipper: a week of years had to pass before sorrow, and
solitude, and study empowered me to feel my own steps, or
think I felt, planted on that central summit; to see
the great phantom company 'girdled with the gleaming
'world' and lying beside their nectar; to drink from the
golden cups in which it has been stored for us and all the
ages by Homer, and Sappho, and Simonides, and Pindar,
and Aeschylus, and Heracleitus, and Plato.

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

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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

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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

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