r. What she was to me no words can express. I will not say
that she was dearer to me than anything in the world; for my sister who
was with me was equally dear; but she was as dear to me as one human
being can be to another. Even now, when time has begun to do its healing
office, I cannot write about her without being altogether unmanned. That
I have not utterly sunk under this blow I owe chiefly to literature.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;--to be able to
converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal! Many times during
the last few weeks I have repeated to myself those fine lines of old
Hesiod:

ei gar tis kai penthos egon neokedei thumo
aksetai kradien akakhemenos, autar aoidos
mousaon therapon kleia proteron anthropon
umnese, makaras te theous oi Olumpon ekhousi,
aips oge dusphroneon epilethetai oude ti kedeon
memnetai takheos de paretrape dora theaon.

["For if to one whose grief is fresh as he sits silent with
sorrow-stricken heart, a minstrel, the henchman of the Muses, celebrates
the men of old and the gods who possess Olympus; straightway he forgets
his melancholy, and remembers not at all his grief, beguiled by the
blessed gift of the goddesses of song." In Macaulay's Hesiod this
passage is scored with three lines in pencil.]

I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing
to myself. I have never felt anything like it. I was enraptured with
Italian during the six months which I gave up to it; and I was little
less pleased with Spanish. But, when I went back to the Greek, I felt
as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that
wonderful people! There is not one art, not one science, about which we
may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the
victory over superstition, "Primum Graius homo--."

I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these
great masters while still in the full vigour of life, and when my taste
and judgment are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever
read before they are five and twenty. They never find time for such
studies afterwards till they are in the decline of life; and then their
knowledge of the language is in a great measure lost, and cannot easily
be recovered. Accordingly, almost all the ideas that people have of
Greek literature, are ideas formed while they were still very young. A
young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such