The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

Thus ended the period of the germination of my life. This is the background with which I entered the propylaea of youth. 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" of Boileau, whose first canto I still remember to this day. Vasily Evdokimovich bequeathed a devotion to Pushkin and the young literature, the metaphysical obscurity of romanticism, and a notebook of written verses, which I committed to memory even better than Boileau. Temira bequeathed a sincere, warm feeling of love and friendship, a tear shed over the "Vicar of Wakefield," and later over herself when she left for Melenki in the autumn. Ergo, on one side, classicism in the form of Marshal; on the other, romanticism in the form of Paciforsky; and life in the form of Temira—and at the center of it all, myself, a fervent boy, ready for all sorts of impressions, wise beyond his years, developed partly by force, or more correctly, artificially, by the reading of novels and eternal solitude.

Thus my life continued until my fifteenth year.

II.

YOUTH.

A charming time in the development of a person, when a child perceives himself as a youth and for the first time demands a share in everything human. Activity boils, the heart beats, the blood is hot, strength is abundant, and the world is so good, new, bright, and filled with the triumph and jubilation of life. The valor of Achilles and the dreaminess of Posa fill the soul. A time of noble enthusiasms, self-sacrifices, Platonism, and ardent love for humanity, boundless friendship—a brilliant prologue that very often is followed by a vulgar, philistine drama.

Reason ascends, but in passing through the clouds of fantasy, it