s a student of rhetoric at Rome.

Though the manner of his work was changed formally from poetry to
prose, he remained, and must always be, of the poetic temper: by which,
I mean, among other things, that quite [154] independently of the
general habit of that pensive age he lived much, and as it were by
system, in reminiscence. Amid his eager grasping at the sensation, the
consciousness, of the present, he had come to see that, after all, the
main point of economy in the conduct of the present, was the
question:--How will it look to me, at what shall I value it, this day
next year?--that in any given day or month one's main concern was its
impression for the memory. A strange trick memory sometimes played
him; for, with no natural gradation, what was of last month, or of
yesterday, of to-day even, would seem as far off, as entirely detached
from him, as things of ten years ago. Detached from him, yet very real,
there lay certain spaces of his life, in delicate perspective, under a
favourable light; and, somehow, all the less fortunate detail and
circumstance had parted from them. Such hours were oftenest those in
which he had been helped by work of others to the pleasurable
apprehension of art, of nature, or of life. "Not what I do, but what I
am, under the power of this vision"--he would say to himself--"is what
were indeed pleasing to the gods!"

And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who had taken for his
philosophic ideal the monochronos hedone+ of Aristippus--the pleasure
of the ideal present, of the mystic now--there would come, together
with that precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire, after
all, [155] to retain "what was so transitive." Could he but arrest,
for others also, certain clauses of experience, as the imaginative
memory presented them to himself! In those grand, hot summers, he
would have imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers. To create, to
live, perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it were but
in a fragment of perfect expression:--it was thus his longing defined
itself for something to hold by amid the "perpetual flux." With men of
his vocation, people were apt to say, words were things. Well! with
him, words should be indeed things,--the word, the phrase, valuable in
exact proportion to the transparency with which it conveyed to others
the apprehension, the emotion, the mood, so vividly real within
himself. Verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur