a good "tip" for his journey when he was leaving his native town, but may
also have put him up in his own house at Carthage. Such was the atonement
for those enormous fortunes of antiquity: the rich had to give freely and
constantly. With the parcelling out of wealth we have become much more
egoistical.

In any case, Romanianus, taken up with his pleasures and business, could
not have been much of a guide for Monnica's son. Augustin was therefore
without control, or very nearly. No doubt he came to Carthage with a strong
desire to increase his knowledge and get renown, but still more athirst
for love and the emotions of sentiment. The love-prelude was deliriously
prolonged for him. He was at that time so overwhelmed by it, that it is the
first thing he thinks of when he relates his years at Carthage. "To love
and be loved" seems to him, as to his dear Alexandrine poets, the single
object of life. Yet he was not in love, "but he loved the idea of love."
_Nondum amabam, et amare amabam ... amare amans...._

Truly, never a pagan poet had hitherto found such language to speak
of love. These subtle phrases are not only the work of a marvellous
word-smith: through their almost imperceptible shades of meaning may be
descried an entirely new soul, the pleasure-loving soul of the old world
awakening to spiritual life. Modern people have repeated the words more
than enough, but by translating them too literally--"I loved to love"--they
have perhaps distorted the sense. They have made Augustin a kind of
Romantic like Alfred de Musset, a dilettante in love. Augustin is not so
modern, although he often seems one of ourselves. When he wrote those words
he was a bishop and a penitent. What strikes him above all in looking back
upon his uneasy and feverish life as a youth and young man, is the great
onrush of all his being which swept him towards love. Plainly, man is made
for love, since he loves without object and without cause, since in itself