a thing--that he, like others, should at any
rate establish himself comfortably? and will not some honester man than
himself live after him in the fine house? Come now, confess, I used to
say, that you yourself, in his place, might not have done much better:
confess, at least, that when you were a boy you put your fingers into
the sugar-bowl when you should have kept them out, when you well knew
that you ought to keep them out! And then my friend would confess the
pressure of the "environment," the power of the "Zeit-Geist," as we
have learned to call it since then. Poor man! That was long ago; and
things have changed greatly in Askelon of latter years. They tell me
that everybody there has now grown honest, and that nobody goes around
any more reading invisible writing on the houses. And all the fine
buildings are still standing, it appears; though the journals of that
city remark that some of the Grecian architecture has peeled off from
the fronts of the houses in the Pentodon, having been insecurely
fastened on, it seems, at first. And how my poor friend used to
criticise those very palaces in his dry, technical way! One thing in
particular that he said I remember by the antithesis, the turn of it;
he used to say that the architects of Askelon were never certain
whether to construct ornament or to ornament construction.

Well, he is gone now; he will never blame Askelon again, or run down
Gath. He died in Philistia. Perhaps he served his purpose there, but I
am sure he would have done more if he had been a little less Quixotic
in his notions.

But let us not grow tristful again. How many a happy escape, as we
said, has been made from Philistia; how many a clear spirit has made
its way out of the darkness to a true honor. If many who have had the
higher endowments have perished in the shadow, princes dying behind the
iron mask, yet not all have failed; some have broken away to a career.
Of two such in particular let us conclude by speaking--Winckelmann and
Heine. Both were Prussians, and each one migrated from the north into a
southern country, a fugitive from "the power of the night, the press of
the storm." Each waited long before his opportunity came; each learned
that the "tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours." But each found
his opportunity; and by what an instinctive escape! For Winckelmann it
was his first journey out of Prussia, when, in 1755, he set his face
toward Rome; still it was a homing flight