I am speaking must be exercised and directed to what is beautiful,
before that age is reached, at which one would be afraid to confess that
one had no taste for it."

Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regulated Winckelmann's
friendships, it could not be said that it gave no pain. One notable
friendship, the fortune of which we may trace through his letters, begins
with an antique, chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily in a burst
of angry fire. Far from reaching the quietism, the bland indifference of
art, such attachments are nevertheless more susceptible than any others
of equal strength of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, of
physical excitement, they contain only just so much as stimulates the eye
to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These friendships, often the
caprices of a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled
colouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art,
that shrine of grave and mellow light for the mute Olympian family. The
impression which Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those about him
was that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather than the
contemplative evolution of general principles. The quick, susceptible
enthusiast, betraying his temperament even in appearance, by his olive
complexion, his deep-seated, piercing eyes, his rapid movements,
apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, not through
the understanding, but by instinct or touch. A German biographer of
Winckelmann has compared him to Columbus. That is not the aptest of
comparisons; but it reminds one of a passage in which M. Edgar Quinet
describes the great discoverer's famous voyage. His science was often at
fault; but he had a way of estimating at once the slightest indication of
land, in a floating weed or passing bird; he seemed actually to come
nearer to nature than other men. And that world in which others had moved
with so much embarrassment, seems to call out in Winckelmann new senses
fitted to deal with it. He is in touch with it; it penetrates him, and
becomes part of his temperament. He remodels his writings with constant
renewal of insight; he catches the thread of a whole sequence of laws in
some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair; he seems to realise
that fancy of the reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge hidden for a time
in the mind itself; as if the mind of one, lover and philosopher at once
in some phase of pr