intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind
through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects.
The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence
or content which finds all the elements of life in its own
soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and
deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to
his states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible
to him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to
which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world,--the Fore-World, as the Germans say,
--I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with
researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken
reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in
Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods
from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of
the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later?
What but this, that every man passes personally through a
Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily
nature, the perfection of the senses,--of the spiritual
nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed
those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his
models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms
abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face
is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt,
sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets