LXIV.
During the thousands of hours in which I was thus confined between the stove, the screen, the window, the child, and the dog, I read over all that antiquity has written and bequeathed to us, except the poets, with whom we had been surfeited at school, and in whose verses our wearied eyes saw but the caæsura, and the long or short syllables. Sad effect of premature satiety, which withers in the mind of a child the most brightly tinted and perfumed flowers of human thought. But I read over every philosopher, orator, and historian, in his own language. I loved especially those who united the three great faculties of intelligence,—narration, eloquence, and reflection; the fact, the discourse, and the moral. Thucydides and Tacitus above all others; then Machiavelli, the sublime practitioner of the diseases of empires; then Cicero, the sonorous vessel which contains all, from the individual tears of the man, the husband, the father, and the friend, up to the catastrophes of Rome and of the world, even to his gloomy forebodings of his own fate. There is in Cicero a stratum of divine philosophy and serenity, through which all waters seem to be filtrated and clarified, and through which his great mind flows in torrents of eloquence, wisdom, piety, and harmony. I had, till then, thought him a great but empty speaker, with little sense contained in his long periods; I was mistaken. Next to Plato, he is the word of antiquity made man; his style is the grandest of any language. We suppose him meagre, because his drapery is so magnificent; but strip him of his purple and you will still find a vast mind, which has felt, understood, and said, all that there was to comprehend, to feel, or to say, in his day in Rome.