He read Plato, being even more fascinated by the exquisite technique of the dialectic than by the ethical value of the teaching.
And there was one small, slim book that he always carried about with him, and kept for special reading in the fields and woods.

This was Virgil's Eclogues, the sylvan atmosphere of which penetrated the very depths of his being, and created in him a moral or spiritual atmosphere which was its counterpart.

He seemed to live amid gracious pastoral scenes, where beautiful youths and maidens passed a perpetual springtime in a land of dewy lawns, and shady groves, and pools, and rippling streams.

Daphnis and Mopsus, Corydon, Alexis, and Amyntas, were all to him real personages, who peopled his solitude, inspired his poetic fancy, and fostered in his imagination the elements of an ideal life where the beauty and purity and freshness of untainted Nature reigned supreme.

The accident of his lameness, by incapacitating him for violent exercise out of doors, ministered to the development of this spiritual tendency, and threw him back upon the allurements of a refined idealism.