They lived not in vain. We can
converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or
personality.
I know of no studies so composing as those of the classical
scholar. When we have sat down to them, life seems as still
and serene as if it were very far off, and I believe it is
not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and
unexaggerated as in the light of literature. In serene hours we
contemplate the tour of the Greek and Latin authors with more
pleasure than the traveller does the fairest scenery of Greece or
Italy. Where shall we find a more refined society? That highway
down from Homer and Hesiod to Horace and Juvenal is more attractive
than the Appian. Reading the classics, or conversing with those
old Greeks and Latins in their surviving works, is like walking
amid the stars and constellations, a high and by way serene to
travel. Indeed, the true scholar will be not a little of an
astronomer in his habits. Distracting cares will not be allowed
to obstruct the field of his vision, for the higher regions of
literature, like astronomy, are above storm and darkness.
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