singers, a "voice of joy and health," concentrated itself with solemn
antistrophic movement, into an evening, or "candle" hymn.

"Hail! Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured,
Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest:--
Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung
With undefiled tongue."--

[105] It was like the evening itself made audible, its hopes and fears,
with the stars shining in the midst of it. Half above, half below the
level white mist, dividing the light from the darkness, came now the
mistress of this place, the wealthy Roman matron, left early a widow a
few years before, by Cecilius "Confessor and Saint." With a certain
antique severity in the gathering of the long mantle, and with coif or
veil folded decorously below the chin, "gray within gray," to the mind
of Marius her temperate beauty brought reminiscences of the serious and
virile character of the best female statuary of Greece. Quite foreign,
however, to any Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care,
with which she carried a little child at rest in her arms. Another, a
year or two older, walked beside, the fingers of one hand within her
girdle. She paused for a moment with a greeting for Cornelius.

That visionary scene was the close, the fitting close, of the
afternoon's strange experiences. A few minutes later, passing forward
on his way along the public road, he could have fancied it a dream.
The house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious house he
had lately visited at Tusculum. And what a contrast was presented by
the former, in its suggestions of hopeful industry, of immaculate
cleanness, of responsive affection!--all alike determined by that
transporting discovery of some fact, or series [106] of facts, in which
the old puzzle of life had found its solution. In truth, one of his
most characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing
for escape--for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very
spaces of life, it might be, along which he had lingered most
pleasantly--for a lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon.
It was like the necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set
a window or open doorway in the background of his picture; or like a
sick man's longing for northern coolness, and the whispering
willow-trees, amid the breathless evergreen forests of the south. To
some such effect had this visit occurred to him, and through so slight