schoolmasters desired him to elaborate the lament of the dying Queen Dido
in Latin prose, what he wrote had a veritable quiver of anguish. Without
the least defence against lust and the delusions of the heart, he spent
intellectually and in a single outburst all the strength of passion.

He absorbed every love-poem with the eagerness of a participating soul. If
he took pleasure in the licentiousness of Plautus and Terence, if he read
delightfully those comedies wherein the worst weaknesses are excused and
glorified, I believe that he took still more pleasure in the Latin Elegiacs
who present without any shame the romantic madness of Alexandrine love.
For what sing these poets even to weariness, unless it be that no one can
resist the Cyprian goddess, that life has no other end but love? Love for
itself, to love for the sake of loving--there is the constant subject of
these sensualists, of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid. After the story
of Dido, the youthful reader was ravished by the story of Ariadne, even
more disturbing, because no remorse modifies the frenzy of it. He read:

_Now while the careless hero flees, beating the wave with his
and casting to the gales of the open sea his idle promises,--there,
standing among the shingle of the beach, the daughter of Minos follows
him, alas! with her beautiful sad eyes: she stares, astonied, like to a
Bacchante changed into a statue. She looks forth, and her heart floats
upon the great waves of her grief. She lets slip from her head her
fine-spun coif, she tears away the thin veils which cover her bosom,
and the smooth cincture which supports her quivering breasts. All that
slips from her body into the salt foam which ripples round her feet.
But little she cares for her coif or for her apparel carried away by
the tide! Lost, bewildered, with all her heart and all her soul, she is
clinging to thee, O Theseus._