Tusculum, he entered another curious house.

"The house in which she lives," says that mystical German writer quoted
once before, "is for the orderly soul, which does not live on [93]
blindly before her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences,
building and adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for herself,
only an expansion of the body; as the body, according to the philosophy
of Swedenborg,+ is but a process, an expansion, of the soul. For such
an orderly soul, as life proceeds, all sorts of delicate affinities
establish themselves, between herself and the doors and passage-ways,
the lights and shadows, of her outward dwelling-place, until she may
seem incorporate with it--until at last, in the entire expressiveness
of what is outward, there is for her, to speak properly, between
outward and inward, no longer any distinction at all; and the light
which creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture or space upon
the wall, the scent of flowers in the air at a particular window,
become to her, not so much apprehended objects, as themselves powers of
apprehension and door-ways to things beyond--the germ or rudiment of
certain new faculties, by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a
matter lying beyond her actually attained capacities of spirit and
sense."

So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we may think, together
with that bodily "tent" or "tabernacle," only one of many vestures for
the clothing of the pilgrim soul, to be left by her, surely, as if on
the wayside, worn-out one by one, as it was from her, indeed, they
borrowed what momentary value or significance they had.

[94] The two friends were returning to Rome from a visit to a
country-house, where again a mixed company of guests had been
assembled; Marius, for his part, a little weary of gossip, and those
sparks of ill-tempered rivalry, which would seem sometimes to be the
only sort of fire the intercourse of people in general society can
strike out of them. A mere reaction upon this, as they started in the
clear morning, made their companionship, at least for one of them,
hardly less tranquillising than the solitude he so much valued.
Something in the south-west wind, combining with their own intention,
favoured increasingly, as the hours wore on, a serenity like that
Marius had felt once before in journeying over the great plain towards
Tibur--a serenity that was to-day brotherly amity also, and seemed to
draw into its own char