ulgar thing--even
they must depend on the manuscript over which we scholars have bent with
that insight into the poet's meaning which is closely akin to the _mens
divinior_ of the poet himself; unless they would flood the world with
grammatical falsities and inexplicable anomalies that would turn the
very fountain of Parnassus into a deluge of poisonous mud. But find the
passage in the fifth book, to which Poliziano refers--I know it very
well."

Seating herself on a low stool, close to her father's knee, Romola took
the book on her lap and read the four verses containing the exclamation
of Actreon.

"It is true, Romola," said Bardo, when she had finished; "it is a true
conception of the poet; for what is that grosser, narrower light by
which men behold merely the petty scene around them, compared with that
far-stretching, lasting light which spreads over centuries of thought,
and over the life of nations, and makes clear to us the minds of the
immortals who have reaped the great harvest and left us to glean in
their furrows? For me, Romola, even when I could see, it was with the
great dead that I lived; while the living often seemed to me mere
spectres--shadows dispossessed of true feeling and intelligence; and
unlike those Lamiae, to whom Poliziano, with that superficial ingenuity
which I do not deny to him, compares our inquisitive Florentines,
because they put on their eyes when they went abroad, and took them off
when they got home again, I have returned from the converse of the
streets as from a forgotten dream, and have sat down among my books,
saying with Petrarca, the modern who is least unworthy to be named after
the ancients, `Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et
viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.'"

"And in one thing you are happier than your favourite Petrarca, father,"
said Romola, affectionately humouring the old man's disposition to
dilate in this way; "for he used to look at his copy of Homer and think
sadly that the Greek was a dead letter to him: so far, he had the inward
blindness that you feel is worse than your outward blindness."

"True, child; for I carry within me the fruits of that fervid study
which I gave to the Greek tongue under the teaching of the younger
Crisolora, and Filelfo, and Argiropulo; though that great work in which
I had desired to gather, as into a firm web, all the threads that my
research had laboriously disentangled, and which wo