His calm and well-weighed expressions, naturally set in clear, concise, and lucid phrase, had all the precision of one who has been used to careful selection in clothing his thoughts for writing or dictation. His sentences were interrupted by long pauses, as if to allow time for them to penetrate the ear, and to be appreciated by the mind of the listener; he relieved them, every now and then, by graceful pleasantry, never degenerating into coarseness, as though he purposely upheld the conversation on these light and sportive wings, to prevent its being borne down by the weight of too continuous ideas. LXXIV. I soon learned to love this charming and talented old man. If I am destined to attain old age, I should wish to grow old like him. There was but one thing grieved me as I looked at him,--it was to see him advancing towards death, without believing in Immortality. The natural sciences that he had so deeply studied had accustomed his mind to trust exclusively to the evidence of his senses. Nothing existed for him that was not palpable; what could not be calculated contained no element of certitude in his eyes; matter and figures composed his universe; numbers were his god; the phenomena of Nature were his revelations, Nature herself his Bible and his gospel; his virtue was instinct, not seeing that numbers, phenomena, Nature, and virtue are but hieroglyphs inscribed on the veil of the temple, whose unanimous meaning is--Deity. Sublime but stubborn minds, who wonderfully ascend the steps of science, one by one,--but will never pass the last, which leads to God. LXXV. This second father very soon became so fond of me, that he proposed to give me occasionally, in his library, some lessons in those elevated sciences which had rendered him illustrious, and now constituted his chief relaxation. I went to him sometimes in the morning; Julie would come at the same hours. It was a rare and touching spectacle to see that old man seated in the midst of his books,--a monument of human learning and philosophy, of which he had exhausted all the pages during his long life,--discovering the mysteries of Nature and of thought to a youth who stood beside him; while a woman, young and lovely as that ideal philosophy, that loving wisdom,--the Beatrice of the poet of Florence,--attended as his first disciple, and was the fellow-learner of that younger brother. She brought the books, turned over the page, and marked the chapters with her extended rosy finger; she moved amid the spheres, the globes, the instruments, and the heaps of volumes, in the dust of human knowledge; and seemed the soul of Nature disengaging itself from matter, to kindle it and teach it to burn and love. I learned and understood more in a few days than in years of dry and solitary study; but the frequent infirmities of age in the master too often interrupted these morning lessons. LXXVI.