of aspect, which surely ought to
accompany, as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like
those. Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with
Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable
physiognomy. With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy
which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the
outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human
faces from "the land which is very far off," we may trace from Giotto
onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael--the serenity, the
[53] durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from
death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed "blitheness "of the
Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly
superficial youth. And yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with
the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching
in the head or heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an
enemy with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in
a thousand forms--the apparent waste of men's gifts in an early, or
even in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of animals;
the disease and pain of the body.

And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius and his
reader.--The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body. Since it
is "the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be
proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither sensation nor
passion to break in upon her," it follows that the true interest of the
spirit must ever be to treat the body--Well! as a corpse attached
thereto, rather than as a living companion--nay, actually to promote
its dissolution. In counterpoise to the inhumanity of this, presenting
itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin against nature,
the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that
reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man.
Such delight indeed had been but [54] a natural consequence of the
sensuous or materialistic character of the philosophy of his choice.
Now to Cornelius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer
terms it, the one true temple in the world; or rather itself the proper
object of worship, of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold
might have its seemliness and due symbolic use:--Ah! and of what
awe-stricken pity als