nst the sky." Yes! the reception of theory, of
hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a great deal on temperament. They
were, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament. A celestial
ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth: that was the assumption which
the experience of Apuleius had suggested to him: it was what, in
different forms, certain persons in every age had instinctively
supposed: they would be glad to find their supposition accredited by
the authority of a grave philosophy. Marius, however, yearning not less
than they, in that hard world of Rome, and below its unpeopled sky, for
the trace of some celestial wing across it, must still object that they
assumed the thing with too much facility, too much of self-complacency.
And his second thought was, that to indulge but for an hour fantasies,
fantastic visions of that sort, only left the actual world more lonely
than ever. For him certainly, and for his solace, the little godship
for whom the rude countryman, an unconscious Platonist, trimmed his
twinkling lamp, would never slip from the bark of these immemorial
olive-trees.--No! not even in the wildest moonlight. For himself, it
was clear, he must still hold by what his eyes really saw. Only, he
had to concede also, that [91] the very boldness of such theory bore
witness, at least, to a variety of human disposition and a consequent
variety of mental view, which might--who can tell?--be correspondent
to, be defined by and define, varieties of facts, of truths, just
"behind the veil," regarding the world all alike had actually before
them as their original premiss or starting-point; a world, wider,
perhaps, in its possibilities than all possible fancies concerning it.

NOTES

75. Joel 2.28.

81. +Halcyone.

CHAPTER XXI: TWO CURIOUS HOUSES

II. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA'S HOUSE

"Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see
visions."

[92] CORNELIUS had certain friends in or near Rome, whose household, to
Marius, as he pondered now and again what might be the determining
influences of that peculiar character, presented itself as possibly its
main secret--the hidden source from which the beauty and strength of a
nature, so persistently fresh in the midst of a somewhat jaded world,
might be derived. But Marius had never yet seen these friends; and it
was almost by accident that the veil of reserve was at last lifted,
and, with strange contrast to his visit to the poet's villa at