d
it--sicut unguentum in capite, descendens in oram vestimenti--so fully
realised, as in the expression, the manner and voice, of this novel
pontiff, as he took his seat on the white chair placed for him by the
young men, and received his long staff into his hand, or moved his
hands--hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious
power--at the Lavabo, or at the various benedictions, or [136] to bless
certain objects on the table before him, chanting in cadence of a grave
sweetness the leading parts of the rite. What profound unction and
mysticity! The solemn character of the singing was at its height when
he opened his lips. Like some new sort of rhapsodos, it was for the
moment as if he alone possessed the words of the office, and they
flowed anew from some permanent source of inspiration within him. The
table or altar at which he presided, below a canopy on delicate spiral
columns, was in fact the tomb of a youthful "witness," of the family of
the Cecilii, who had shed his blood not many years before, and whose
relics were still in this place. It was for his sake the bishop put
his lips so often to the surface before him; the regretful memory of
that death entwining itself, though not without certain notes of
triumph, as a matter of special inward significance, throughout a
service, which was, before all else, from first to last, a
commemoration of the dead.

A sacrifice also,--a sacrifice, it might seem, like the most primitive,
the most natural and enduringly significant of old pagan sacrifices, of
the simplest fruits of the earth. And in connexion with this
circumstance again, as in the actual stones of the building so in the
rite itself, what Marius observed was not so much new matter as a new
spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many observances not
[137] witnessed for the first time to-day. Men and women came to the
altar successively, in perfect order, and deposited below the
lattice-work of pierced white marble, their baskets of wheat and
grapes, incense, oil for the sanctuary lamps; bread and wine
especially--pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan
vineyards. There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and
animating, of the earth's gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself,
now in some way redeemed at last, of all that we can touch or see, in
the midst of a jaded world that had lost the true sense of such things,
and in strong contrast to the wise empe