[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Love for History] At home the works of the great poets of the West, with whom our guest had made us familiar, varied the hours; but I found a still more stirring and congenial interest in the histories of Greek valor, and in the study of the mighty minds that made and unmade empires. With the touching and picturesque narrative of Herodotus in my hand, I pantingly followed the adventures of the most brilliant of nations. I fought the battle with them against the Persian; I saw them gathered in little startled groups on the hills, or flying in their little galleys from island to island, the land deserted, the sea covered with fugitives; the Persian fleets loaded with Asiatic pomp, darkening the waters like a thunder-cloud—and in a moment all changed! The millions of Asia scattered like dust before the wind—Greece lifted to the height of martial glory, and commencing a career of triumph still more illustrious, that triumph of the mind in which, through the remotest vicissitudes of earth, she was to have no conqueror. I especially and passionately pursued the campaigns of that extraordinary man Arrian, whose valor, vanity, and fortune make him one of the landmarks of human nature. In Alexander I delighted in tracing the native form of the Greek through the embroidered robes of royalty and triumph. In his romantic intrepidity and deliberate science, his alternations of profound thought and fantastic folly, the passion for praise and the contempt for its offerers, the rash temper and the noble magnanimity, the love for the arts and the thirst for that perpetual war before which they fly, the philosophic scorn of privation and the feeble lapses into self-indulgence; the generous forecast, which peopled deserts and founded cities, and the giddy and fatal neglect which left his diadem to be fought for and his family to be the prey of rival rebellions,—I saw the true man of the republic; not the lord of the rugged hills of Macedon, but the Athenian of the day of popular splendor and folly, with only the difference of the scepter.