Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/38

Rh hobbies, or forcing their own idiosyncrasies on others who had no mind for them.

"Sometimes, when we found him in his library on a winter afternoon, he would begin talking of Horace, who was a special favourite of his. He used to amuse himself with translating some of the Odes into English verse, and he would now and then read what he had done in this way. These translations were always unconventional and racy, sometimes very felicitous in their turns. They brought out a vein of secret humour running through many of the Odes in which it had not been hitherto suspected.

"At other times I have heard him discourse of Wordsworth, and of the early feelings which that great poet had awakened in him. When he spoke on this and other kindred subjects he brought out a richness of literary knowledge, and a delicacy and keenness of appreciation, of which his philosophic writings, except by their fine style, give no hint. I used sometimes to think that the exclusively abstract line of thinking to which he had in his later years devoted himself, and the demonstrative form into which he had tried to cast his thoughts, had shut out the free play of those imaginative perceptions, with which, unlike most other living metaphysicians, he was by nature richly gifted.

"His malady, which no doubt he himself had known long before, first revealed itself fully to those beyond his own household by the severe illness with