owed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein, on the real
greatness of those little troubles of children, of which older people
make light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected how
richly possessed his life had actually been by beautiful aspects and
imageries, seeing how greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbed
his peace.

Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to
contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an
earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his
solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of
the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and
became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an
idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from
within, by the exercise [25] of meditative power. A vein of subjective
philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, there
would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct,
with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men's valuations. And
the generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace up
to the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance to
him. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful word
umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense,
might describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for the
sacerdotal function hereditary in his family--the sort of mystic
enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and
ascesis, which such preparation involved. Like the young Ion in the
beautiful opening of the play of Euripides, who every morning sweeps
the temple floor with such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he
was apt to be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to their
peculiar influences which he never outgrew; so that often in
after-times, quite unexpectedly, this feeling would revive in him with
undiminished freshness. That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood,
the sense of dedication, survived through all the distractions of the
world, and when all thought of such vocation had finally passed from
him, as a ministry, in spirit at least, towards a sort of hieratic
beauty and order in the conduct of life.

[26] And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the
lad's pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble
to the coast, over the