posterity; he lives for the work he loves; and if he knows that he
will have few readers in the future--maybe none--how many read
Grotius, or Boethius, or Chrysostom, or Jerome?

Here, like a colony of ants, the generations had crowded one on
another, now swept away by the stamp of a conqueror's heel and now
succeeded by another toiling swarm, building anew each time out of
ruin, undaunted by the certainty of destruction, taught nothing by
the fate of their precursors. From the profound sense of despair
which the contemplation of the uselessness of human effort, and the
waste of human life, produces on the scholar's mind, it was a relief
to him to watch the gladness of its river, the buoyancy of its
currents, the foam of white blossom on its acacia and syringa
thickets, the gold sceptres and green lances of its iris-pseudacorus,
the sweep of the winds through its bulrushes and canebreaks, the
glory of colour in the blue stars of its veronica, the bright rosy
spikes of its epilobium. The river seemed always happy, even when the
great rainfall of autumn churned it into froth and the lightnings
illumined its ink-black pools.

It was on the river that he had first made friends with Adone, then a
child of six, playing and splashing in the stream, on a midsummer
noon. Don Silverio also was bathing. Adone, a little nude figure, as
white as alabaster in the hot light, for he was very fair of skin,
sprang suddenly out of the water on to the turf above where his
breeches and shirt had been left; he was in haste, for he had heard
his mother calling to him from their fields; an adder started out of
a coil of bindweed and would itself round his ankle as he stooped for
his clothes.