him. And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that
intuitional observation which I noted down in starting--that Unamuno
resembles the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his
passions--a thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive
and feels therefore plenty of them. But a word of caution may here be
necessary, since that term, "passion," having been diminished--that is,
made meaner--by the world, an erroneous impression might be conveyed by
what precedes, of the life and ways of Unamuno. So that it may not be
superfluous to say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in
the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the
reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, and a
man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a
restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match
in any literature. _Yet_ a passionate man--or, as he would perhaps
prefer to say, _therefore_ a passionate man. But in a major, not in a
minor key; of strong, not of weak passions.

The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the man with strong
passions lives them, while the man with weak passions is lived by them,
so that while weak passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man
to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake,
which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the
mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his
time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book
will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the
stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker--the Biblical, Greek, Roman,
and Italian cultures--but there is hardly anything worth reading in
Europe and America which he has not read, and, but for the Slav
languages, in the original. Though never out of Spain, and seldom out of
Salamanca, he has succeeded in establishing direct connections with most