anhood, the pressure of a school
position, and all the worry and annoyance that are experienced in such a
career--all these he had suffered as many others have. He had reached
the age of thirty without having enjoyed a single favor at the hands of
fate; yet in him were planted the germs of an enviable happiness, very
possible to realize.

Even in these unhappy days we find the trace of that impulse to know for
himself with his own eyes the conditions of the world, gloomy and
disjointed traces it is true, but expressed with sufficient decision. A
few attempts to see strange lands, undertaken without sufficient
reflection, were unsuccessful. He dreamed of a journey to Egypt; he set
out by way of France, but unforeseen obstacles turned him back. More
wisely guided by his genius, he at last seized upon the idea of forcing
his way to Rome. He felt how very profitable a sojourn in the Eternal
City would be for him. This was no whim, no mere thought; it was a
decided plan, which he undertook to realize with cleverness and
decision.

THE ANTIQUE

Man can accomplish much by the opportune use of individual powers, he
can even accomplish extraordinary things by the combination of several
powers; but the unique, the startling, he can only achieve when all
capabilities are evenly united in him. This last was the happy lot of
the ancients, especially of the Greeks in their best period; to the
other two alternatives we moderns are unfortunately limited by fate.

When the healthy nature of man acts as a unit, when he realizes his
place in the world as part of a great and worthy whole, when a
harmonious well-being accords him a pure and free happiness--then the
universe, if it had the power of self-realization, its end attained,
would rejoice and admire this culmination of its own genesis and
existence. For to what purpose is the array of suns, planets and moons,
of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of worlds existing and
arising, if it be not that a happy man may unconsciously rejoice in his
own existence?

While, in almost every act of contemplation, the modern thinker, as we
have just done, projects himself into the infinite, to return only in
the end--if he is happy enough in succeeding therein--to a limited
proposition, the ancients, without following a long, round-about path,
found their exclusive happiness within the lovely confines of this
world. Here they were placed, to this end they had been called, here
the