t amount of enjoyment, as because
to be occupied, in this way, with the aesthetic or imaginative side of
things, is to be in real contact with those elements of his own nature,
and of theirs, which, for him at [26] least, are matter of the most
real kind of apprehension. As other men are concentrated upon truths
of number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures
of appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of
refined sensation. And in the prosecution of this love of beauty, he
claims an entire personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty,
above all, from what may seem conventional answers to first questions.

But, without him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea,
widely extended in time and place, in a kind of impregnable possession
of human life--a system, which, like some other great products of the
conjoint efforts of human mind through many generations, is rich in the
world's experience; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one lets in a
great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were with a single
step, a great experience of one's own, and with great consequent
increase to one's sense of colour, variety, and relief, in the
spectacle of men and things. The mere sense that one belongs to a
system--an imperial system or organisation--has, in itself, the
expanding power of a great experience; as some have felt who have been
admitted from narrower sects into the communion of the catholic church;
or as the old Roman citizen felt. It is, we might fancy, what the
coming into possession of a very widely spoken language might be, with
a great literature, which is also [27] the speech of the people we have
to live among.

A wonderful order, actually in possession of human life!--grown
inextricably through and through it; penetrating into its laws, its
very language, its mere habits of decorum, in a thousand half-conscious
ways; yet still felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal; and, as
such, awakening hope, and an aim, identical with the one only
consistent aspiration of mankind! In the apprehension of that, just
then, Marius seemed to have joined company once more with his own old
self; to have overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to Rome,
with absolute sincerity, on the search for perfection. It defined not
so much a change of practice, as of sympathy--a new departure, an
expansion, of sympathy. It involved, certainly, some curtailment of