duty
of thus making discreet, systematic use of the power of imaginative
vision for purposes of spiritual culture, "since the soul takes colour
from its fantasies," is a point he has frequently insisted on.

The influence of these seasonable meditations--a symbol, or sacrament,
because an intensified [39] condition, of the soul's own ordinary and
natural life--would remain upon it, perhaps for many days. There were
experiences he could not forget, intuitions beyond price, he had come
by in this way, which were almost like the breaking of a physical light
upon his mind; as the great Augustus was said to have seen a mysterious
physical splendour, yonder, upon the summit of the Capitol, where the
altar of the Sibyl now stood. With a prayer, therefore, for inward
quiet, for conformity to the divine reason, he read some select
passages of Plato, which bear upon the harmony of the reason, in all
its forms, with itself--"Could there be Cosmos, that wonderful,
reasonable order, in him, and nothing but disorder in the world
without?" It was from this question he had passed on to the vision of
a reasonable, a divine, order, not in nature, but in the condition of
human affairs--that unseen Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs
Beata--in which, a consciousness of the divine will being everywhere
realised, there would be, among other felicitous differences from this
lower visible world, no more quite hopeless death, of men, or children,
or of their affections. He had tried to-day, as never before, to make
the most of this vision of a New Rome, to realise it as distinctly as
he could,--and, as it were, find his way along its streets, ere he went
down into a world so irksomely different, to make his practical effort
towards it, with a soul full of [40] compassion for men as they were.
However distinct the mental image might have been to him, with the
descent of but one flight of steps into the market-place below, it must
have retreated again, as if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond
the utmost verge of the horizon. But it had been actually, in his
clearest vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable entry,
a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose
novel expression he, the great physiognomist, could by no means read.
Plato, indeed, had been able to articulate, to see, at least in
thought, his ideal city. But just because Aurelius had passed beyond
Plato, in the scope of the