beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished took
him early away, that he might the better recall in reverie all the
circumstances of the celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep,
pleasant with all the influences of long hours in the open air, he
seemed still to be moving in procession through the fields, with a kind
of pleasurable awe. That feeling was still upon him as he [12] awoke
amid the beating of violent rain on the shutters, in the first storm of
the season. The thunder which startled him from sleep seemed to make
the solitude of his chamber almost painfully complete, as if the
nearness of those angry clouds shut him up in a close place alone in
the world. Then he thought of the sort of protection which that day's
ceremonies assured. To procure an agreement with the gods--Pacem
deorum exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day been
busy upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he would fain have
those Powers at least not against him. His own nearer household gods
were all around his bed. The spell of his religion as a part of the
very essence of home, its intimacy, its dignity and security, was
forcible at that moment; only, it seemed to involve certain heavy
demands upon him.

CHAPTER II: WHITE-NIGHTS

[13] To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the
childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt,
as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,--surely nothing
could happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or
reverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.*
"The red rose came first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of
"the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an
after-thought--the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves
but half-real, half-material--the white queen, the white witch, the
white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass
turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young
candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of
rehearsal." So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same
analogy, should be [14] nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but
passed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainly
the place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in this, that
you might very well conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in the
daytime might come to much there.