But in listening to the master Julian never succeeded in discovering the potency of his words. The meta-physic of the school of Porphyrius seemed to him dull, dead, and painfully complicated. Iamblicus would, it is true, emerge a playful victor from the most difficult dialectical discussions. His teaching about God, about the World, about the Ideas, was full of profound learning; but in it lay no vital stimulus. Julian had hoped otherwise, and nevertheless he hung about, and did not set off again homewards. The eyes of Iamblicus were strange, green, and deeply-sunk in his bronzed face. Julian was persuaded that these weird and by no means holy eyes betokened some hidden wisdom, the occult wisdom of the serpent, concerning which Iamblicus never spoke to his pupils. But when "the Divine," in his cracked voice, used to ask why his barley broth was not ready, or complained of gout, the spell was broken. On one occasion Iamblicus was sauntering with Julian on the seashore, outside the town. It was a soft and melancholy evening. Behind the castle of Panormos in the distance glittered, with their array of statues, the terraces of the celebrated temple of the Ephesian Artemis. The dark reeds along the sandy shore made no rustle. It was the spot where Latona gave birth to Artemis and Apollo. Smoke of numberless altars in the sacred Orthegian wood was rising in columns into the sky. To the south the Samian mountains shone blue on the horizon. Wavelets fell calmly as the breathings of a child, and pellucid waves swelled over the rocks. The setting sun, hidden behind vapour, gilded the edge of enormous cloud-masses. Iamblicus seated himself upon a boulder, and Julian threw himself on the ground at his feet. The master caressed the thick black locks of the pupil. "Are you sad?" "Yes." "I know you are sad. You seek and you do not find. You have not the strength to say '_He is_,' and you are afraid to say '_He is not_.'" "How have you guessed this, Master?" "My poor boy! for fifty years have I not suffered from the same pain? And I shall suffer from it till I die. Do you imagine that I know Him better than you--that I have discovered what you have missed? _That_ is the birth-pain that never ceases. Beside it other tortures are as nothing. People think that they suffer from hunger, from poverty, from thirst; in reality they suffer only from the thought that perhaps He has no existence. Who shall dare to say '_He exists not_?' and yet what superhuman strength one must have to say, '_He is_'!" "Do you mean to say that you, even you, have never come near Him?" "Thrice in my life have I borne the ecstacy of feeling myself wholly at one with Him. Plotinus felt it four times, Porphyrius five times. But as for me, the moments in my existence in which life was worth living were precisely three." "I have questioned your pupils on this subject; they knew nothing."