The Remaining Works of Benedict de Spinoza

Thus ended the vegetative period of my life. This is the background with which I entered the propylaea of youth. The Marshal bequeathed to me a love for elegant form, a love for Greece and Rome, logical clarity, the history of French literature, and the art poétique poetic art of Boileau, whose first canto I remember to this day; Vasily Evdokimovich bequeathed to me a worship of Pushkin and young literature, the metaphysical obscurity of Romanticism, and a notebook of written verses, which I committed to memory even better than Boileau; Temira—a sincere, warm feeling of love and friendship, a tear for "The Vicar of Wakefield" and later for her own self when, in the autumn, she left for Melenki. Ergó Therefore, on one side was classicism in the form of the Marshal, on the other—Romanticism in the form of Paciforsky, and life in the form of Temira—and in the center of it all was I, a fervent boy, ready for any impression, wise beyond my years, developed partly forcibly, or more truly, artificially, by the reading of novels and eternal solitude.

Thus my life continued until my fifteenth year.

A charming time in the development of a person, when the child realizes himself to be a youth and demands for the first time his share in everything human: activity boils, the heart beats, the blood is hot, there is much strength; and the world is so good, new, bright, filled with triumph, the jubilation of life... The daring of Achilles and the dreaminess of Posa fill the soul. A time of noble enthusiasms, self-sacrifices, Platonism, ardent love for humanity, limitless friendship: a brilliant prologue, which all too often is followed by a vulgar, philistine drama.

Reason rises—but, passing through the clouds of fantasy, it