f another city. He passes through the city
gate, and then he is at the famous Ceramicus; here are the tombs of the
mighty dead; and here, we will suppose, is Pericles himself, the most
elevated, the most thrilling of orators, converting a funeral oration
over the slain into a philosophical panegyric of the living.

Onwards he proceeds still; and now he has come to that still more
celebrated Academe, which has bestowed its own name on Universities
down to this day; and there he sees a sight which will be graven on his
memory till he dies. Many are the beauties of the place, the groves,
and the statues, and the temple, and the stream of the Cephissus
flowing by; many are the lessons which will be taught him day after day
by teacher or by companion; but his eye is just now arrested by one
object; it is the very presence of Plato. He does not hear a word that
he says; he does not care to hear; he asks neither for discourse nor
disputation; what he sees is a whole, complete in itself, not to be
increased by addition, and greater than anything else. It will be a
point in the history of his life; a stay for his memory to rest on, a
burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with men of like mind,
ever afterwards. Such is the spell which the living man exerts on his
fellows, for good or for evil. How nature impels us to lean upon
others, making virtue, or genius, or name, the qualification for our
doing so! A Spaniard is said to have travelled to Italy, simply to see
Livy; he had his fill of gazing, and then went back again home. Had
our young stranger got nothing by his voyage but the sight of the
breathing and moving Plato, had he entered no lecture-room to hear, no
gymnasium to converse, he had got some measure of education, and
something to tell of to his grandchildren.

But Plato is not the only sage, nor the sight of him the only lesson to
be learned in this wonderful suburb. It is the region and the realm of
philosophy. Colleges were the inventions of many centuries later; and
they imply a sort of cloistered life, or at least a life of rule,
scarcely natural to an Athenian. It was the boast of the philosophic
statesman of Athens, that his countrymen achieved by the mere force of
nature and the love of the noble and the great, what other people aimed
at by laborious discipline; and all who came among them were submitted
to the same method of education. We have traced our student on his
wanderings from the