In this philologist, however, there was no want of poetic feeling or vivid imagination. When reading the ancients, he completely lived in their world and with them. He once told a friend who had called on him and found him in great emotion, that he often could not bear to read more than a few pages at a time in the old tragic poets; he realised so vividly all that was said, and done, and suffered. “He could see Antigone leading her blind father—the aged Œdipus entering the grove—he could catch the music of their speech.” Neither in this youth, so stored, so fed with books, was there any deadness of heart towards the living friend. We have some letters full of a painful sensitiveness at the apprehension that his correspondent had forgotten or grown cold towards him. The gravest fault in his character was too quick a temper; but if this led him to take offence unjustly, he was always sufficiently just and generous to seek for reconciliation. Least of all had his erudition or his erudite labours quenched the moral enthusiasm of his nature. From childhood up to manhood, from manhood to his latest day, the same high sense of moral rectitude pervaded all his judgments, and influenced all his actions. The same boy who would not receive praise if he did not think he deserved it, in after years would not draw a salary if he did not think it was rigidly earned, nor accept a present even from a municipality—from the city of Geneva—for rendering a service which he had spontaneously performed. At the university of Kiel we find him breaking with an intimate friend, and much to his own regret, because he finds that friend holding philosophical tenets destructive, as he thinks, of the sentiment of moral obligation. “He is a fatalist and indifferentist. I subscribe to Kant’s principles with all my heart. I have broken with M., not from any dispute we have had, but on account of the detestable conclusions which necessarily follow from his opinions, conclusions that absolutely annihilate morality. I really loved him notwithstanding, but, with such principles, I could not be his friend.” Considering the singular and precarious tenure by which a Kantian holds his faith in the freedom of the will, this was rather severe dealing, not a quite perfect example of philosophical toleration; but it shows, at least, that the heart was in the right place.