The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the 22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the 29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is compelled to listen to the case. This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange. He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning, walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen, ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within, although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,--the biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,--not the shadowy world of states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher, as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality? Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so, from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,--hair, moss, roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,--was hidden by the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full of broken inscriptions. 18. CYCLE.