Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/183

Rh on so high an occasion—are true in their measure of every genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm—that, in the broad Platonic sense of the 'Phædrus,' was the secret of his divinatory power over the Hellenic world. This enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great degree on bodily temperament, gathering into itself the stress of the nerves and the heat of the blood, has a power of reinforcing the purer motions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervid friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido's archangel. These friendships, bringing him in contact with the pride of human form, and staining his thoughts with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation with the spirit of Greek sculpture. A letter on taste, addressed from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich von Berg, is the record of such a friendship.

'I shall excuse my delay,' he begins, 'in fulfilling my promise of an essay on the taste for beauty in works of art, in the words of Pindar. He says to Agesidamus, a youth of Locri, ίδέά τε κακόν, ώρά τε κεκραμένον, whom he had kept waiting for an intended ode, that a debt paid with usury is the end