We have seen how definite was the leading motive of his
culture; how, like some central root-fibre, it maintained the
well-rounded unity of his life through a thousand distractions.
Interests not his, nor meant for him, never disturbed him. In morals, as
in criticism, he followed the clue of an unerring instinct. Penetrating
into the antique world by his passion, his temperament, he enunciates no
formal principles, always hard and one-sided. Minute and anxious as his
culture was, he never became one-sidedly self-analytical. Occupied ever
with himself, perfecting himself and cultivating his genius, he was not
content, as so often happens with such natures, that the atmosphere
between him and other minds should be thick and clouded; he was ever
jealously refining his meaning into a form, express, clear, objective.
This temperament he nurtured and invigorated by friendships which kept
him ever in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The beauty of the
Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the least
traces of sex.
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