an accident. Rome and Roman life, just then, were come to seem like
some stifling forest of bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign
enchantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet with roots in
a deep, down-trodden soil of poignant human susceptibilities. In the
midst of its suffocation, that old longing for escape had been
satisfied by this vision of the church in Cecilia's house, as never
before. It was still, indeed, according to the unchangeable law of his
temperament, to the eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those
experiences appealed--the peaceful light and shade, the boys whose very
faces seemed to sing, the virginal beauty of the mother and her
children. But, in his case, what was thus visible constituted a moral
[107] or spiritual influence, of a somewhat exigent and controlling
character, added anew to life, a new element therein, with which,
consistently with his own chosen maxim, he must make terms.

The thirst for every kind of experience, encouraged by a philosophy
which taught that nothing was intrinsically great or small, good or
evil, had ever been at strife in him with a hieratic refinement, in
which the boy-priest survived, prompting always the selection of what
was perfect of its kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of his soul
thereto. This had carried him along in a continuous communion with
ideals, certainly realised in part, either in the conditions of his own
being, or in the actual company about him, above all, in Cornelius.
Surely, in this strange new society he had touched upon for the first
time to-day--in this strange family, like "a garden enclosed"--was the
fulfilment of all the preferences, the judgments, of that
half-understood friend, which of late years had been his protection so
often amid the perplexities of life. Here, it might be, was, if not
the cure, yet the solace or anodyne of his great sorrows--of that
constitutional sorrowfulness, not peculiar to himself perhaps, but
which had made his life certainly like one long "disease of the
spirit." Merciful intention made itself known remedially here, in the
mere contact of the air, like a soft touch upon aching [108] flesh. On
the other hand, he was aware that new responsibilities also might be
awakened--new and untried responsibilities--a demand for something from
him in return. Might this new vision, like the malignant beauty of
pagan Medusa, be exclusive of any admiring gaze upon anything but
itself? At