credulous or the faithful.

"They were, in fact, cups or vases of burnt clay, rude in form: and the
religious veneration thus offered to them expressed men's desire to
give honour to a simpler age, before iron had found place in human
life: the persuasion that that age was worth remembering: a hope that
it might come again.

"That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, has been the hope or
the dream of some, in every period. Yet if he did come back, or any
equivalent of his presence, he could but weaken, and by no means smite
through, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human
sense, in things, which one must carefully distinguish from all
preventible accidents. Death, and the little perpetual daily dyings,
which have something of its sting, he must [180] necessarily leave
untouched. And, methinks, that were all the rest of man's life framed
entirely to his liking, he would straightway begin to sadden himself,
over the fate--say, of the flowers! For there is, there has come to be
since Numa lived perhaps, a capacity for sorrow in his heart, which
grows with all the growth, alike of the individual and of the race, in
intellectual delicacy and power, and which will find its aliment.

"Of that sort of golden age, indeed, one discerns even now a trace,
here and there. Often have I maintained that, in this generous
southern country at least, Epicureanism is the special philosophy of
the poor. How little I myself really need, when people leave me alone,
with the intellectual powers at work serenely. The drops of falling
water, a few wild flowers with their priceless fragrance, a few tufts
even of half-dead leaves, changing colour in the quiet of a room that
has but light and shadow in it; these, for a susceptible mind, might
well do duty for all the glory of Augustus. I notice sometimes what I
conceive to be the precise character of the fondness of the roughest
working-people for their young children, a fine appreciation, not only
of their serviceable affection, but of their visible graces: and
indeed, in this country, the children are almost always worth looking
at. I see daily, in fine weather, a child like a delicate nosegay,
running to meet the rudest of brick- [181] makers as he comes from
work. She is not at all afraid to hang upon his rough hand: and
through her, he reaches out to, he makes his own, something from that
strange region, so distant from him yet so real, of the world's
refin