uth of European thought. But it grows young
again for a while in almost every youthful soul. It is spoken of
sometimes as the appropriate utterance of jaded men; but in them it can
hardly be sincere, or, by the nature of the case, an enthusiasm. "Walk
in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes," is,
indeed, most often, [16] according to the supposition of the book from
which I quote it, the counsel of the young, who feel that the sunshine
is pleasant along their veins, and wintry weather, though in a general
sense foreseen, a long way off. The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism,
the self-abandonment to one favourite mode of thought or taste, which
occurs, quite naturally, at the outset of every really vigorous
intellectual career, finds its special opportunity in a theory such as
that so carefully put together by Marius, just because it seems to call
on one to make the sacrifice, accompanied by a vivid sensation of power
and will, of what others value--sacrifice of some conviction, or
doctrine, or supposed first principle--for the sake of that clear-eyed
intellectual consistency, which is like spotless bodily cleanliness, or
scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the mind of the youthful
student, when he first comes to appreciate it, the fascination of an
ideal.

The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of strenuousness or
enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance of the "jaded Epicurean,"
as of the strong young man in all the freshness of thought and feeling,
fascinated by the notion of raising his life to the level of a daring
theory, while, in the first genial heat of existence, the beauty of the
physical world strikes potently upon his wide-open, unwearied senses.
He discovers a great new poem every spring, with a hundred delightful
things he too has felt, but [16] which have never been expressed, or at
least never so truly, before. The workshops of the artists, who can
select and set before us what is really most distinguished in visible
life, are open to him. He thinks that the old Platonic, or the new
Baconian philosophy, has been better explained than by the authors
themselves, or with some striking original development, this very
month. In the quiet heat of early summer, on the dusty gold morning,
the music comes, louder at intervals, above the hum of voices from some
neighbouring church, among the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps,
only for the poetically rapt faces