ad come to understand each other at last. There was
weakness in all this; as there is in all care for dead persons, to
which nevertheless people will always yield in proportion as they
really care for one another. With a vain yearning, as he stood there,
still to be able to do something for them, he reflected that such doing
must be, after all, in the nature of things, mainly for himself. His
own epitaph might be that old one eskhatos tou idiou genous+ --He was
the last of his race! Of those who might come hither after himself
probably no one would ever again come quite as he had done to-day; and
it was under the influence of this thought that he determined to bury
all that, deep below the surface, to be remembered only by him, and in
a way which would claim no sentiment from the indifferent. That took
many days--was like a renewal of lengthy old burial rites--as he
himself watched the work, early and late; coming on the last day very
early, and anticipating, by stealth, the last touches, while the
workmen were absent; one young lad only, finally smoothing down the
earthy bed, greatly surprised at the seriousness with which Marius
flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould.

NOTES

207. +Transliteration: eskhatos tou idiou genous. Translation: "[he
was] the last of his race."

CHAPTER XXVIII: ANIMA NATURALITER CHRISTIANA

[208] THOSE eight days at his old home, so mournfully occupied, had
been for Marius in some sort a forcible disruption from the world and
the roots of his life in it. He had been carried out of himself as
never before; and when the time was over, it was as if the claim over
him of the earth below had been vindicated, over against the interests
of that living world around. Dead, yet sentient and caressing hands
seemed to reach out of the ground and to be clinging about him.
Looking back sometimes now, from about the midway of life--the age, as
he conceived, at which one begins to redescend one's life--though
antedating it a little, in his sad humour, he would note, almost with
surprise, the unbroken placidity of the contemplation in which it had
been passed. His own temper, his early theoretic scheme of things,
would have pushed him on to movement and adventure. Actually, as
circumstances had determined, all its movement [209] had been inward;
movement of observation only, or even of pure meditation; in part,
perhaps, because throughout it had been something of a m