His lectures, which were at first brilliant enough to attract numbers of men from other colleges, became gradually mere dry, ingenious skeletons, without life or feeling.

It was possible to learn a great deal from him; it was not possible to catch from him any contagion of that _amor intellectualis_ which had flamed at one moment so high within him.
He ceased to compose; but as the intellectual faculty must have some employment, he became a translator, a contributor to dictionaries, a microscopic student of texts, not in the interest of anything beyond, but simply as a kind of mental stone-breaking.
The only survival of that moment of glow and color in his life was his love of music and the theatre.

Almost every year he disappeared to France to haunt the Paris theatres for a fortnight; to Berlin or Bayreuth to drink his fill of music.

He talked neither of music nor of acting; he made no one sharer of his enjoyment, if he did enjoy.

It was simply his way of cheating his creative faculty, which, though it had grown impotent, was still there, still restless.