a certain lively gratitude.

Himself--his sensations and ideas--never fell again precisely into
focus as on that day, yet he was the richer by its experience. But for
once only to have come under the power of that peculiar mood, to have
felt the train of reflections which belong to it really forcible and
conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion, to have
apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal
gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the
shadows of the world, left this one particular hour a marked point in
life never to be forgotten. It gave him a definitely ascertained
measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul must
make upon the powers, whatsoever they might be, which [72] had brought
him, as he was, into the world at all. And again, would he be faithful
to himself, to his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions, if he
did but remain just there? Must not all that remained of life be but a
search for the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual
things--a gathering together of every trace or token of it, which his
actual experience might present?

PART THE FOURTH

CHAPTER XX: TWO CURIOUS HOUSES

I. GUESTS

"Your old men shall dream dreams."+

[75] A NATURE like that of Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of
instincts almost physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual
judgments, was perhaps even less susceptible than other men's
characters of essential change. And yet the experience of that
fortunate hour, seeming to gather into one central act of vision all
the deeper impressions his mind had ever received, did not leave him
quite as he had been. For his mental view, at least, it changed
measurably the world about him, of which he was still indeed a curious
spectator, but which looked further off, was weaker in its hold, and,
in a sense, less real to him than ever. It was as if he viewed it
through a diminishing glass. And the permanency of this change he
could note, some years later, when it [76] happened that he was a guest
at a feast, in which the various exciting elements of Roman life, its
physical and intellectual accomplishments, its frivolity and
far-fetched elegances, its strange, mystic essays after the unseen,
were elaborately combined. The great Apuleius, the literary ideal of
his boyhood, had arrived in Rome,--was now visiting Tusculum, at the
house of their common friend, a c