He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were
almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again,
he would sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English
poetry, or telling me about his long stay in Italy.
I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative
talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of
personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows
together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the
carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his
brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the
shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his
face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he
spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the
roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses,
the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains.
Pages:
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234