man the very humblest to arrogate, viz., an individuality of mental
constitution so far applicable to special and exceptionable cases as
to reveal in _them_ a life and power of beauty which others (and
sometimes which _all_ others) had missed.

The first case belongs to the march (or boundary) line between my eighth
and ninth years; the others to a period earlier by two and a half
years. But I notice the latest case before the others, as it connected
itself with a great epoch in the movement of my intellect. There is
a dignity to every man in the mere historical assigning, if accurately
he can assign, the first dawning upon his mind of any godlike faculty
or apprehension, and more especially if that first dawning happened
to connect itself with circumstances of individual or incommunicable
splendor. The passage which I am going to cite first of all revealed
to me the immeasurableness of the morally sublime. What was it, and
where was it? Strange the reader will think it, and strange [3] it is,
that a case of colossal sublimity should first emerge from such a writer
as Phaedrus, the Aesopian fabulist. A great mistake it was, on the part
of Doctor S., that the second book in the Latin language which I was
summoned to study should have been Phaedrus--a writer ambitious of
investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of Aesop with aulic
graces and satiric brilliancy. But so it was; and Phaedrus naturally
towered into enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that the most
intellectual of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised
a mighty statue to one who belonged to the same class in a social sense
as himself, viz., the class of slaves, and rose above that class by
the same intellectual power applying itself to the same object, viz.,
the moral apologue. These were the two lines in which that glory of
the sublime, so stirring to my childish sense, seemed to burn as in
some mighty pharos:--