answer from our own unexplored and hidden consciousness, or replying to the questions of the soul, in the strictest sense perform the work of Education. Now first, as in the South we gaze, a week's journey distant, on some 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 worshipper: 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.

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 last incorporate the proud foliage of the passing summer. But this impression was partial and imaginative: a foretaste, a dim earnest, or at most a gleam ' like the flashing of a shield', whilst the human form that bore it was hidden. From the fragments in which, by a common but injudicious school arrangement, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Livy were studied, I learned little it is, I think, only when read in their continuity, and in more experienced years, that these great histories properly seize on the mind. Cicero's philosophical works, the shorter essays especially, conveyed almost the pleasure of poetry by the vague largeness of the thought, the sweetness and latterday humanity of the moral sentiments, the fine cadences and balanced amplitude of the style. Yet my profit in these studies was lessened by a perversity or narrowness of view from which my companions were free. For, influenced by some foolish fancy, I hardly know whence derived, in all ancient works I endeavoured to trace foreshadowings of Christian religious feeling, or presumptuously contrasted what I imagined the imperfect morality and half-vision of poets and philosophers with the better things of the middle or modern ages. Thus Plato and Lucretius were for some years (I note it as a warning to any youthful and sympathetic reader) rendered useless to me by a boy's weak vanity.

Their masterworks fared as an ancient statue among children, chipped and dishonoured one day, the next decorated with toys and dressed up in finery: I christianized the one, and anathematized the other. A translation of Aristotle's Nikomachean Ethics, drawn forth one morning from a corner of my father's library, first broke these clouds a little. That great lordly morality, presented in a form so severe and dissimilar even from Cicero's treatment, impressed 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 revelling 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 pedantry or the world's sneer at imaginative enthusiasm, Virgil, as in the middle ages, is a magician still. As a personal companion, with whom more than most living comrades I had held converse of delightful intimacy, I loved him then, and love him now: I would not surrender this visionary affection for many so-called realities. Others too are similarly dear: if there be any recognition after the grave, how rich I am, and in what friends! But most the lines painting in purple light and with a grace almost superhuman the image of passion, allured me. These seemed a prophetic anticipation: songs written nominally indeed for imperial Rome, but in their secret essence destined after nineteen centuries to be a boy's delight, and carry the praises of Beauty beneath the beech-woods of world-exiled and inaccessible Britain. The seer, as men said of old, blended with the poet. Virgil, in his purple-robed and laurelled majesty had stooped to whisper messages of tenderness to an English child: it was Virgil who bade me track that Star by the road of manly excellence. If any one had asked me, when reading for the hundredth time the Little one, 'I saw thee gathering the dewy apples' (lines already quoted), what I read, I might have answered,' Of Désirée '.

Turnus' dying phrase, that last cry wrung forth when surrendering his bride to one less worthy, the 'tua est Lavinia conjux', shook me, I recollect, with oracular terror by its intensity of passionate resignation :

Hic gelidi fontes; hic mollia prata, Lycori;
hic nemus hic ipso tecum consumerer aevo—

summed up the sweet abandonment of a desire which, with Gallus, I was to learn could be consummated by no labour, and conquered by no defeat . . . . . Is it a childish pleasure to record these little things? If so, I am a child yet.

.....

XXII I have dwelt with some minuteness on my first studies, because, whatever growth of mind belongs to the years under narration was in fact the result mainly of these and of the passion of love. For even at the time I was not much influenced by the premature friendships, since faded, of school thinking of them almost as contrasts to set off and glorify that ever-present image of Désirée and this the more, because the strongly marked, and I might say tumultuous, avowal of boyish affection, was in its nature antagonistic to the sweet silent secrecy of that other. Nor, again, were the general direction and spirit of the study inculcated, in themselves (I think) elevated, or such as impress those on the threshold of youth: the crises of intellectual life came to any, if they came at all, not from superior guidance, not from a scientifically ordered scheme of education, but through their individual thought, through personal and private intercourse (and perhaps better so) with the master-spirits. I recollect indeed always with affection the venerable buildings in the old Cathedral city,