But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths, wheat-garlands,--all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and what a dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,--and Shakespeare and the British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in their abstract poems),--all these had left behind in the happy youth an everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor, and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens. In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through Dian and his journeys, even Albano's _exterior_ man had been trained to grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon worth is an uncommon fault,--as _high_ towers, for that very reason, appear _bent over_. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not, like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow, unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.