The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

Thus ended the period of my life's germination. Here is the foundation 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 song I still remember to this day; Vasily Evdokimovich bequeathed a worship of Pushkin and young literature, the metaphysical obscurity of Romanticism, and a notebook of written verses, which I learned by heart even better than Boileau; Temira bequeathed a sincere, warm feeling of love and friendship, a tear for "The Vicar of Wakefield," and later for herself when she left for Melenki in the autumn. Ergo 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 at the center of everything was I myself, a fervent boy, ready for any impressions, wise beyond his years, developed partly forcibly, or more accurately, artificially, by the reading of novels and eternal solitude.

Thus my life continued until my fifteenth year.

II.

YOUTH.

A charming time in human development, when a child realizes himself as a youth and for the first time demands a share in all things human: activity boils, the heart beats, the blood is hot, there is great strength; and the world is so good, new, bright, full of triumph, exultation, and life. The boldness of Achilles and the dreaminess of Posa fill the soul. It is a time of noble enthusiasms, self-sacrifices, Platonism, ardent love for humanity, and boundless friendship: a brilliant prologue, followed all too often by a vulgar, philistine drama.

Reason ascends—but, passing through the clouds of fantasies, it