in Vienna in after
years. She was brought up in the utmost moral and strict seclusion, but
she found in her room an aperture through which she could witness all
that took place in the neighbouring room of a _maison de passe_; but
being a great philosopher, she in time regarded it all as the "butterfly
passing show" of a theatre, the mere idle play of foolish mortal
passions.

Even before I began my Freshman year there came into my life a slight but
new and valuable influence. Professor Dodd, when I arrived, had just
begun his course of lectures on architecture. To my great astonishment,
but not at all to that of George Boker, I was invited to attend the
course, Boker remarking dryly that he had no doubt that Dodd thanked God
for having at last got an auditor who would appreciate him. Which I
certainly did. I in after years listened to the great Thiersch, who
trained Heine to art, and of whom I was a special _protege_, and many
great teachers, but I never listened to any one like Albert Dodd. It was
not with him the mere description of styles and dates; it was a deep and
truly aesthetic feeling that every phase of architecture mirrors and
reciprocally forms its age, and breathes its life and poetry and
religion, which characterised all that he said. It was in nothing like
the subjective rhapsodies of Ruskin, which bloomed out eight years later,
but rather in the spirit of Vischer and Taine, which J. A. Symonds has so
beautifully and clearly set forth in his Essays {98}--that is, the spirit
of historical development. Here my German philosophy enabled me to grasp
a subtle and delicate spirit of beauty, which passed, I fear, over the
heads of the rest of the youthful audience. His ideas of the
correspondence of Egyptian architecture to the stupendous massiveness of
Pantheism and the appalling grandeur of its ideas, were clear enough to
me, who had copied Hermes Trismegistus and read with deepest feeling the
Orphic and Chaldean oracles. The ideas had not only been long familiar
to me, but formed my very life and the subject of the most passionate
study. To hear them clearly expressed with rare beauty, in the deep,
strange voice of the professor, was joy beyond belief. And as it would
not be in human nature for a lecturer not to note an admiring auditor, it
happened often enough that something was often introduced for my special
appreciation.

For I may here note--and it was a very natural thing--that just as Gyp