his old service of gold
plate, and would have had the lad a virtuoso in nothing less costly
than gold--gold snuff-boxes.

For, in truth, regarding what belongs to art or culture, as elsewhere,
we may have a large appetite and little to feed on. Only, in the
things of the mind, the appetite itself counts for so much, at least in
hopeful, unobstructed youth, with the world before it. "You are the
Apollo you tell us of, the northern Apollo," people were beginning to
say to him, surprised from time to time by a mental purpose beyond
their guesses--expressions, liftings, softly gleaming or vehement
lights, in the handsome countenance of the youth, and his effective
speech, as he roamed, inviting all about him to share the [129] honey,
from music to painting, from painting to the drama, all alike florid in
style, yes! and perhaps third-rate. And so far consistently throughout
he had held that the centre of one's intellectual system must be
understood to be in France. He had thoughts of proceeding to that
country, secretly, in person, there to attain the very impress of its
genius.

Meantime, its more portable flowers came to order in abundance. That
the roses, so to put it, were but excellent artificial flowers,
redolent only of musk, neither disproved for Carl the validity of his
ideal nor for our minds the vocation of Carl himself in these matters.
In art, as in all other things of the mind, again, much depends on the
receiver; and the higher informing capacity, if it exist within, will
mould an unpromising matter to itself, will realise itself by
selection, and the preference of the better in what is bad or
indifferent, asserting its prerogative under the most unlikely
conditions. People had in Carl, could they have understood it, the
spectacle, under those superficial braveries, of a really heroic effort
of mind at a disadvantage. That rococo seventeenth-century French
imitation of the true Renaissance, called out in Carl a boundless
enthusiasm, as the Italian original had done two centuries before. He
put into his reception of the aesthetic achievements of Lewis the
Fourteenth what young France had felt when Francis the First brought
home the great [130] Da Vinci and his works. It was but himself truly,
after all, that he had found, so fresh and real, among those artificial
roses.

He was thrown the more upon such outward and sensuous products of
mind--architecture, pottery, presently on music--because for h