So Septimius looked up out of his thoughts, and said proudly: "Why should I
die? I cannot die, if worthy to live. What if I should say this moment
that I will not die, not till ages hence, not till the world is exhausted?
Let other men die, if they choose, or yield; let him that is strong enough
live!"

After this flush of heroic mood, however, the glow subsided, and poor
Septimius spent the rest of the day, as was his wont, poring over his
books, in which all the meanings seemed dead and mouldy, and like pressed
leaves (some of which dropped out of the books as he opened them), brown,
brittle, sapless; so even the thoughts, which when the writers had
gathered them seemed to them so brightly colored and full of life. Then he
began to see that there must have been some principle of life left out of
the book, so that these gathered thoughts lacked something that had given
them their only value. Then he suspected that the way truly to live and
answer the purposes of life was not to gather up thoughts into books,
where they grew so dry, but to live and still be going about, full of
green wisdom, ripening ever, not in maxims cut and dry, but a wisdom ready
for daily occasions, like a living fountain; and that to be this, it was
necessary to exist long on earth, drink in all its lessons, and not to die
on the attainment of some smattering of truth; but to live all the more
for that; and apply it to mankind and increase it thereby.

Everything drifted towards the strong, strange eddy into which his mind had
been drawn: all his thoughts set hitherward.

So he sat brooding in his study until the shrill-voiced old woman--an aunt,
who was his housekeeper and domestic ruler--called him to dinner,--a
frugal dinner,--and chided him for seeming inattentive to a dish of early
dandelions which she had gathered for him; but yet tempered her severity