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148 with their 'vowelled' Greek, his warmest cult. Whole nights of fever axe devoted to them; disturbing dreams of an Odyssey of his own come to him. 'Il se sentit attiré vers le Midi, avec ardeur,' Madame de Staël says of him; 'on retrouve encore souvent dans les imaginations Allemandes quelques traces de cet amour du soleil, de cette fatigue du Nord, qui entraîna les peuples septentrionaux dans les contrées méridionales. Un beau ciel fait naître des sentiments semblables à l'amour de la patrie.'

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 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 travel continually passing through his mind, to Egypt, for instance, and 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 to handle the antique, he was 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 Branden-