Through the _Investigations of Beauty in Painting_, by Daniel Webb, which was founded on Winckelmann's _Thoughts on Imitation_, the seed of Hellenism was already sown in the youth's soul. He heard talk of the dwarf intelligences of the age; how the studios of inferior artists were full of gaping visitors, whilst the halls of the Vatican stood deserted. "Learn the taste for beauty in the antique," the cooper's apprentice learns from Webb's works. "Let us meditate upon the style of the painter's art in the 'Laocoön,' with regard to the fighter. Notice the sublimity in the divine character of Apollo. Let us stand hushed before the exquisite beauty of the Venus di Medici. These are the extreme incentives of the art of drawing.... The Belvedere Apollo and the daughter of Niobe offer us an ideal of nobility and beauty. Raphael's drawing never reached to such a height of perfection as we find in the statues of the Greeks.... Whither do you carry me, gods and demigods and heroes who live in marble? I follow your call, and, Imagination! thy eternal laws. I go into the Villa Medici and breathe there the purest air. I stretch myself on a flowery plot, the shadow of the orange trees covers me;--there, unmolested, I gaze at a group full of the highest feminine beauty. Niobe, my beloved, beautiful mother of beautiful children, thou fairest among women, how I love thee!" So dreamed Asmus Jacob in the wine-cellar at Eckernförde, or in his solitary chamber by the dim light of his lamp, as he had been seized with giddiness before all the great and marvellous revelations of art which this book had afforded him. In his enraptured fantasy he painted the hour nearer and nearer when he should attain to a sight of the works which were described. Could he have looked into the future, what a picture would have come before his eyes! Would he have recognised himself in the broken-down man, with the pale countenance, the grief-marked expression, and the decrepit figure, who in Rome gazed spellbound at the Colossus of Monte Cavallo? [Illustration: CARSTENS. SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.]