LXXV.
This second father very soon became so fond of me, that he proposed to give me occasionally, in his library, some lessons in those elevated sciences which had rendered him illustrious, and now constituted his chief relaxation. I went to him sometimes in the morning; Julie would come at the same hours. It was a rare and touching spectacle to see that old man seated in the midst of his books,—a monument of human learning and philosophy, of which he had exhausted all the pages during his long life,—discovering the mysteries of Nature and of thought to a youth who stood beside him; while a woman, young and lovely as that ideal philosophy, that loving wisdom,—the Beatrice of the poet of Florence,—attended as his first disciple, and was the fellow-learner of that younger brother. She brought the books, turned over the page, and marked the chapters with her extended rosy finger; she moved amid the spheres, the globes, the instruments, and the heaps of volumes, in the dust of human knowledge; and seemed the soul of Nature disengaging itself from matter, to kindle it and teach it to burn and love.
I learned and understood more in a few days than in years of dry and solitary study; but the frequent infirmities of age in the master too often interrupted these morning lessons.