The various pathetic traits of the beloved, suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him a materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee.
As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetry had passed away, [126] to be replaced by the literature of thought.

His much-pondered manuscript verses were laid aside; and what happened now to one, who was certainly to be something of a poet from first to last, looked at the moment like a change from poetry to prose.

He came of age about this time, his own master though with beardless face; and at eighteen, an age at which, then as now, many youths of capacity, who fancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from others chiefly in affectation and vague dreaming, he secluded himself indeed from others, but in a severe intellectual meditation, that salt of poetry, without which all the more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative world.
Still with something of the old religious earnestness of his childhood, he set himself--Sich im Denken zu orientiren--to determine his bearings, as by compass, in the world of thought--to get that precise acquaintance with the creative intelligence itself, its structure and capacities, its relation to other parts of himself and to other things, without which, certainly, no poetry can be masterly.

Like a young man rich in this world's goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, and ascertain his outlook.

There must be no disguises.