Other interests, practical or
intellectual, those slighter talents and motives not supreme, which in
most men are the waste part of nature, and drain away their vitality, he
plucked out and cast from him. The protracted longing of his youth is not
a vague, romantic longing: he knows what he longs for, what he wills.
Within its severe limits his enthusiasm burns like lava. "You know," says
Lavater, speaking of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I consider ardour
and indifference by no means incompatible in the same character. If ever
there was a striking instance of that union, it is in the countenance
before us." "A lowly childhood," says Goethe, "insufficient instruction
in youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the burden of
school-keeping! He was thirty years old before he enjoyed a single favour
of fortune: but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of
freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in the
ancient sense."
But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached the south.
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