eyed intellectual consistency, which is like spotless bodily
cleanliness, or scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the
mind of the youthful student, when he first comes to appreciate it,
the fascination of an ideal.

The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of strenuousness or
enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance of the "jaded
Epicurean," as of the strong young man in all the freshness of
thought and feeling, fascinated by the notion of raising his life to
the level of a daring theory, while, in the first genial heat of
existence, the beauty of the physical world strikes potently upon his
wide-open, unwearied senses. He discovers a great new poem every
spring, with a hundred delightful things he too has felt, but [16]
which have never been expressed, or at least never so truly, before.
The workshops of the artists, who can select and set before us what
is really most distinguished in visible life, are open to him. He
thinks that the old Platonic, or the new Baconian philosophy, has
been better explained than by the authors themselves, or with some
striking original development, this very month. In the quiet heat of
early summer, on the dusty gold morning, the music comes, louder at
intervals, above the hum of voices from some neighbouring church,
among the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps, only for the
poetically rapt faces among priests or worshippers, or the mere skill
and eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and
righteousness. In his scrupulous idealism, indeed, he too feels
himself to be something of a priest, and that devotion of his days to
the contemplation of what is beautiful, a sort of perpetual religious
service. Afar off, how many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts
await him! At that age, with minds of a certain constitution, no
very choice or exceptional circumstances are needed to provoke an