education largely increased one's capacity for enjoyment. He was acquiring what it is the chief function of all higher education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, [54] the elements of distinction, in our everyday life—of so exclusively living in them—that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or débris of our days, comes to be as though it were not. And the consciousness of this aim came with the reading of one particular book, then fresh in the world, with which he fell in about this time—a book which awakened the poetic or romantic capacity as perhaps some other book might have done, but was peculiar in giving it a direction emphatically sensuous. It made him, in that visionary reception of every-day life, the seer, more especially, of a revelation in colour and form. If our modern education, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind of idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as its professed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of ancient literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened also, long ago, with Marius and his friend.

NOTES

43. +Transliteration: Mouseion. The word means "seat of the muses." Translation: "O sea! O shore! my own Helicon, / How many things have you uncovered to me, how many things suggested!" Pliny, Letters, Book I, ix, to Minicius Fundanus.

50. +Transliteration: hoia theous epenênothen aien eontas. Translation: "such as the gods are endowed with." Homer, Odyssey, 8.365.