"At Padua was soon known Antony Ehrenstein's determination to make
that distant journey; and no one was surprised at it: there were,
indeed, many who envied him.

"In truth, the age in which Antony lived was calculated to attune the
mind to the search after the unknown, and to serve as an excuse for
his visions. The age of deep profligacy, it was also the age of lofty
talents, of bold enterprises, of great discoveries. They dug into the
bowels of the earth; they kept up in the laboratory an unextinguished
fire; they united and separated elements; they buried themselves
living, in the tomb, to discover the philosopher's stone, and they
found it in the innumerable treasures of chemistry which they
bequeathed to posterity. Nicholas Diaz and Vasco de Gama had passed,
with one gigantic stride, from one hemisphere to another, and showed
that millions of their predecessors were but pigmies. The genius of a
third visioned forth a new world, with new oceans--went to it, and
brought it to mankind. Gunpowder, the compass, printing, cheap paper,
regular armies, the concentration of states and powers, ingenious
destruction, and ingenious creation--all were the work of this
wondrous age. At this time, also, there began to spread indistinctly
about, in Germany and many other countries of Europe, those ideas of
reformation, which soon were strengthened, by the persecution of the
Western Church, to array themselves in the logical head of Luther,
and to flame up in that universal crater, whence the fury, lava, and
smoke, were to rush with such tremendous violence on kingdoms and
nations. These ideas were then spreading through the multitude, and
when resisted, they broke through their dikes, and burst onward with
greater violence. The character of Antony, eager, thirsting for
novelty, was the expression of his age: he abandoned himself to the