reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed
that secondary existence, that warm place still left, in thought at
least, beside the living, the desire for which is actually, in various
forms, so great a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, even
thus early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands to lay one
to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural
want. The soft lines of the white hands and face, set among the many
folds of the veil and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her
needlework, or with music sometimes, defined themselves for him as the
typical expression of maternity. Helping her with her white and purple
wools, and caring for her musical instruments, he won, as if from the
handling of such things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying
duly his country-grown habits--the sense of a certain delicate
blandness, which he relished, above all, on returning to the "chapel"
of his mother, after long days of open-air exercise, in winter or
stormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less
strongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with
the very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in
flower, though the hail is beating hard without. One important
principle, of fruit afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for the
country fixed deeply in him; in the winters especially, when the
sufferings of [22] the animal world became so palpable even to the
least observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the
almost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It
was a feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for
life as such--for that mysterious essence which man is powerless to
create in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of his
mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for the
hungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told him once,
looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across
a crowded public place--his own soul was like that! Would it reach the
hands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled?
And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things,
its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central
type of all love;--so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality
of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the
rest o