trongly moved him. At Rome,
spending a whole year drawing from the antique, in preparation for
Iphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's memory ever active.
Winckelmann's Roman life was simple, primeval, Greek. His delicate
constitution permitted him the use only of bread and wine. Condemned by
many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of honour, but only to
see his merits acknowledged, and existence assured to him. He was simple
without being niggardly; he desired to be neither poor nor rich.

Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the elements of an
intellectual situation of the highest interest. The beating of the
intellect against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the
still barbarous literature of Germany, are afar off; before him are
adequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the first tokens
of the advent of the new German literature, with its broad horizons, its
boundless intellectual promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of the
Inferno, is filled with a sharp and joyful sense of light, which makes
him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully
touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is the principle
pre-eminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have more
colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is
pre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived by
those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the
sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of the
Renaissance. This repression, removed at last, gave force and glow to
Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic spirit. "There had been
known before him," says Madame de Stael, "learned men who might be
consulted like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a
pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity." "One is always a poor
executant of conceptions not one's own."--On execute mal ce qu'on n'a pas
concu soi-meme*--words spoken on so high an occasion--are true in their
measure of every genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm--that, in the broad
Platonic sense of the Phaedrus, was the secret of his divinatory power
over the Hellenic world. This enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great
degree on bodily temperament, has a power of re-enforcing the purer
emotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his
affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the s