The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

Thus ended the period of the dormancy 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 art of poetry of Boileau, whose first canto I still remember to this day; Vasily Yevdokimovich bequeathed to me a worship of Pushkin and young literature, the metaphysical vagueness 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 for the "Vicar of Wakefield," and later for herself, when in the autumn she left for Melenki. Ergó Therefore, on one side 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 it all, I myself: a fervent boy, ready for any impression, wise beyond his years, developed partly forcibly, or more accurately, artificially, by the reading of novels and eternal solitude.

So my life continued until my fifteenth year.

II.

YOUTH.

A charming time in the development of a man, when the child realizes he is a youth and for the first time demands a 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 the triumph and jubilation of life... The valor of Achilles and the dreaminess of Posa fill the soul. It is a time of noble enthusiasms, self-sacrifices, Platonism, and ardent love for humanity, of limitless friendship: a brilliant prologue, which all too often is followed by a vulgar, petty-bourgeois drama.

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