he visible Rome might pass for a figure of that
new, unseen, Rome on high. At moments, Marius even asked himself with
surprise, whether it might be some vast secret society the speaker had
in view:--that august community, to be an outlaw from which, to be
foreign to the manners of which, was a loss so much greater than to be
excluded, into the ends of the earth, from the sovereign Roman
commonwealth. Humanity, a universal order, the great polity, its
aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their example over their
successors--these were the ideas, stimulating enough in their way, [12]
by association with which the Stoic professor had attempted to elevate,
to unite under a single principle, men's moral efforts, himself lifted
up with so genuine an enthusiasm. But where might Marius search for
all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction? Where were those
elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable, winning,
persuasive--whose footsteps through the world were so beautiful in the
actual order he saw--whose faces averted from him, would be more than
he could bear? Where was that comely order, to which as a great fact of
experience he must give its due; to which, as to all other beautiful
"phenomena" in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust himself?

Rome did well to be serious. The discourse ended somewhat abruptly, as
the noise of a great crowd in motion was heard below the walls;
whereupon, the audience, following the humour of the younger element in
it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which the famous
procession, or transvectio, of the military knights was to be seen
passing over the Forum, from their trysting-place at the temple of
Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri. The ceremony took place this
year, not on the day accustomed--anniversary of the victory of Lake
Regillus, with its pair of celestial assistants--and amid the heat and
roses of a Roman July, but, by [13] anticipation, some months earlier,
the almond-trees along the way being still in leafless flower. Through
that light trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, arrayed in all
their gleaming ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive around their
helmets, the faces below which, what with battle and the plague, were
almost all youthful. It was a flowery scene enough, but had to-day its
fulness of war-like meaning; the return of the army to the North, where
the enemy was again upon the move, being now imminent. Cor