But let us not grow tristful again. How many a happy escape, as we said, has been made from Philistia; how many a clear spirit has made its way out of the darkness to a true honor. If many who have had the higher endowments have perished in the shadow, princes dying behind the iron mask, yet not all have failed; some have broken away to a career. Of two such in particular let us conclude by speaking--Winckelmann and Heine. Both were Prussians, and each one migrated from the north into a southern country, a fugitive from "the power of the night, the press of the storm." Each waited long before his opportunity came; each learned that the "tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours." But each found his opportunity; and by what an instinctive escape! For Winckelmann it was his first journey out of Prussia, when, in 1755, he set his face toward Rome; still it was a homing flight like that of a carrier pigeon; for in Rome he found his appointed place, and there he spent in congenial work the remaining years of his life. Yet he could say, in the bitterness of his spirit, on reaching Rome, "I have come into the world and into Italy too late." Nor may we contradict that bitter cry, even in view of Winckelmann's great critical achievement; we have to ask, Might it not have been greater still, had he not been thus _serus studiorum_, as Horace phrases it--thus unluckily belated in his culture? All the traits of these migrations of men of genius are interesting, and we may dwell for a moment, though at the risk of some digression, upon Winckelmann's disappointment on his arrival in the city of his desire. It was a pathetic disappointment, but one of a kind not infrequent with sensitive minds. Long detained by poverty in the north, it was not until the age of thirty-eight that he reached Italy; and when at last he arrived in Rome, the longed-for city wore a strange look for him--had an aspect for which he was not prepared. It was there that his emotion broke out as we have seen. We can understand his disappointment if we bear in mind the cruel treatment to which our fancies are commonly subjected at the hands of the fact. How swiftly, how silently, like the irrevocable sequence of images in a dissolving view, our premonitions vanish under the light of the reality! The actual Rome, the living man, the painting, the landscape which we travel far to see--these dispel at once the preconception; a glance, and the dream is gone, however long domesticated in the mind, however brightly glowing but now in the imagination. Fact is a careless bedfellow, and overlays the tender child Fancy; and even when nature contrives the change less rudely, we can hardly resign our poor, familiar fancies without regret. But sometimes, happily, we can do what Winckelmann did not do; we can retain the old fancies and compare them with the experience. Let me give a personal instance: I remember framing the distinctest image of the lakes of Killarney from my