--Ah indeed, you were no failure, Socrates--you who were
disappointed of your Critias, your Charmides, your Alcibiades,
your whole Athens; you were not anything in the very least like
a failure; for there was yet one among your disciples--

He says, that one, that he was absent through illness during that
last scene of his Teacher's life. I do not know; it has been
thought that may have been merely a pretense, an artistic
convention, to give a heightened value of impersonality to his
marvelous prose:--for it was he who wrote down the account of the
death of Socrates for us: that tragedy so transcendent in its
beauty and lofty calm. But this much is certain: that day he was
born again: became, from a gilded youth of Athens, an eternal
luminary in the heavens, and that which he has remained these
three-and-twenty hundred years: the Poet-Philosopher of the
Soul, the Beacon of the Spirit for the western world....

He had been a brilliant young aristocrat among the crowd
that loved to talk with Socrates: the very best thing that
Athens could produce in the way of birth, charm, talent, and
attainments;--it is a marvel to see one so worshiped of Fortune
in this world, turn so easily to become her best adored in the
heaven of the Soul. On his father's side he was descended from
Codrus, last king of Athens; on his mother's, from Solon: you
could get nothing higher in the way of family and descent. In
himself, he was an accomplished athlete; a brilliant writer of
light prose; a poet of high promise when the mood struck him--
and he had ideas of doing the great thing in tragedy presently;
trained unusually well in music, and in mathematics; deeply
read; with a taste for the philosophies; a man, in short, of