Already he blamed instinctively alike in his work and in himself, as youth so seldom does, all that had not passed a long and liberal process of erasure.

The happy phrase or sentence was really modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupulous thought.

The suggestive force of the one master of his development, who had battled so hard with imaginative prose; the utterance, the golden utterance, of the other, so content with its living power of persuasion that he had never written at all,--in the commixture of these two qualities he set up his literary ideal, and this rare blending of grace with an intellectual [157] rigour or astringency, was the secret of a singular expressiveness in it.
He acquired at this time a certain bookish air, the somewhat sombre habitude of the avowed scholar, which though it never interfered with the perfect tone, "fresh and serenely disposed," of the Roman gentleman, yet qualified it as by an interesting oblique trait, and frightened away some of his equals in age and rank.

The sober discretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation, the sense of those negative conclusions enabling him to concentrate himself, with an absorption so entire, upon what is immediately here and now, gave him a peculiar manner of intellectual confidence, as of one who had indeed been initiated into a great secret .-- Though with an air so disengaged, he seemed to be living so intently in the visible world! And now, in revolt against that pre-occupation with other persons, which had so often perturbed his spirit, his wistful speculations as to what the real, the greater, experience might be, determined in him, not as the longing for love--to be with Cynthia, or Aspasia--but as a thirst for existence in exquisite places.

The veil that was to be lifted for him lay over the works of the old masters of art, in places where nature also had used her mastery.