During the thousands of hours in which I was thus confined between the
stove, the screen, the window, the child, and the dog, I read over all
that antiquity has written and bequeathed to us, except the poets, with
whom we had been surfeited at school, and in whose verses our wearied
eyes saw but the caæsura, and the long or short syllables. Sad effect
of premature satiety, which withers in the mind of a child the most
brightly tinted and perfumed flowers of human thought. But I read over
every philosopher, orator, and historian, in his own language. I loved
especially those who united the three great faculties of
intelligence,--narration, eloquence, and reflection; the fact, the
discourse, and the moral. Thucydides and Tacitus above all others; then
Machiavelli, the sublime practitioner of the diseases of empires; then
Cicero, the sonorous vessel which contains all, from the individual
tears of the man, the husband, the father, and the friend, up to the
catastrophes of Rome and of the world, even to his gloomy forebodings
of his own fate. There is in Cicero a stratum of divine philosophy and
serenity, through which all waters seem to be filtrated and clarified,
and through which his great mind flows in torrents of eloquence,
wisdom, piety, and harmony. I had, till then, thought him a great but
empty speaker, with little sense contained in his long periods; I was
mistaken. Next to Plato, he is the word of antiquity made man; his
style is the grandest of any language. We suppose him meagre, because
his drapery is so magnificent; but strip him of his purple and you will
still find a vast mind, which has felt, understood, and said, all that
there was to comprehend, to feel, or to say, in his day in Rome.