r widespread influence; but I think one can escape from every
influence by limiting oneself to his own line of work. It is strange
that Winckelmann did not attend the University at Leipsic, where, under
the direction of Johann Friedrich Christ, he might, without troubling
himself about a single philosopher in existence, have made much more
comfortable progress in his favorite study.

This is perhaps the proper place for an observation which we should like
to make, in view of recent events--that no scholar can afford to reject,
oppose, or scorn the great philosophical movement begun by Kant, except
the true investigators of antiquity, who by the peculiarity of their
study seem to be especially favored above all other men. For since they
are occupied with the best that the world has produced and only examine
the trivial and the inferior in their relation to the most excellent,
their attainments reach such fullness, their judgment such certainty,
their taste such consistency, that they appear within their own circle
most wonderfully, even astonishingly, cultured. Winckelmann also
attained this good fortune, in which indeed he was greatly assisted by
the influence of the fine arts and of life itself.

POETRY

Although Winckelmann in reading the ancient authors paid great attention
to the poets, an exact examination of his studies and of the course of
his life reveals no particular inclination to poetry; on the contrary,
an aversion occasionally appears. His preference for the old and
accustomed Lutheran church hymns and his desire to possess an uncensored
song book of this kind in Rome reveals the typical and sturdy German,
but not the friend of poetry.

The works of the poets of past ages appear to have interested him at
first as documents of ancient languages and literature, later as
witnesses for the fine arts. It is all the more wonderful and gratifying
when he himself appears as a poet, as an able, unmistakable one, in his
description of statues and in almost all of his later writings. He sees
with his eyes, he grasps with his mind, works indescribable, and yet he
feels an irresistible impulse to master them by the spoken and the
written word. The perfect master-work, the idea in which it had its
origin, the emotion that was awakened in him in beholding it, he wishes
to impart to the hearer or the reader. Reviewing the array of his
aptitudes, he finds himself compelled to seize upon the most powerful
and dignified