sentiments not unlike the love of one's Fatherland.

To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in
spite of its intense outlines, its perfect self-expression, still remains
faint and remote. To him, closely limited except on the one side of the
ideal, building for his dark poverty "a house not made with hands," it
early came to seem more real than the present. In the fantastic plans of
foreign travel continually passing through his mind, to Egypt, for
instance, and to France, there seems always to be rather a wistful sense
of something lost to be regained, than the desire of discovering anything
new. Goethe has told us how, in his eagerness actually to handle the
antique, he became interested in the insignificant vestiges of it which
the neighbourhood of Strasburg contained. So we hear of Winckelmann's
boyish antiquarian wanderings among the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Such
a conformity between himself and Winckelmann, Goethe would have gladly
noted.

At twenty-one he enters the University at Halle, to study theology, as
his friends desire; instead, he becomes the enthusiastic translator of
Herodotus. The condition of Greek learning in German schools and
universities had fallen, and there were no professors at Halle who could
satisfy his sharp, intellectual craving. Of his professional education he
always speaks with scorn, claiming to have been his own teacher from
first to last. His appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source
of culture was within their hands. Homo vagus et inconstans!--one of them
pedantically reports of the future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side
his irony was whetted. When professional education confers nothing but
irritation on a Schiller, no one ought to be surprised; for Schiller, and
such as he, are primarily spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann,
the votary of the gravest of intellectual traditions, should get nothing
but an attempt at suppression from the professional guardians of
learning, is what may well surprise us.

In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen. This was the most
wearisome period of his life. Notwithstanding a success in dealing with
children, which seems to testify to something simple and primeval in his
nature, he found the work of teaching very depressing. Engaged in this
work, he writes that he still has within him a longing desire to attain
to the knowledge of beauty--sehnlich wuenschte zur Kenntniss des Schoenen
z