Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/203

Rh and bids me study its laws, just as people study the rules of a dead language, not in order to practise or to take a living joy in them, but only in order to enable myself, in the quiet depths of my own mind, to do honour to her existence in bygone ages, and her for ever departed glory. As Palladio everywhere refers one to Vitruvius, I have bought Galiani's edition; but this folio suffers in my portmanteau as much as my brain does in the study of it. Palladio, by his words and works, by his method and way, both of thinking and of executing, has brought Vitruvius home to me, and interpreted him far better than the Italian translator ever can. Vitruvius himself is no easy reading: his book is obscurely written, and requires a critical study. Notwithstanding, I have read it through cursorily, and it has left on my mind many a glorious impression. To express my meaning better, I read it like a breviary, more out of devotion than for instruction. Already the days begin to draw in, and allow more time for reading and writing.

God be praised! Whatever from my youth up appeared to me of worth is beginning once more to be dear to me. How happy do I feel that I can again venture to approach the ancient authors! For now I may tell it, and confess at once my disease and my folly. For many a long year I could not bear to look at a Latin author, ornor [sic] to cast my eye upon anything that might serve to awaken in my mind the thoughts of Italy. If by accident I did so, I suffered the most horrible tortures of mind. It was a frequent joke of Herder's, at my expense, that I had learned all my Latin from Spinoza; for he had noticed that this was the only Latin work I ever read. But he was not aware how carefully I was obliged to keep myself from the ancients; how even these abstruse generalities were but cursorily read by me, and even then not without pain. At last matters came to that pitch that even the