And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his golden
image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (now
about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the world
would at last find itself [5] happy, could it detach some reluctant
philosophic student from the more desirable life of celestial
contemplation, and compel him to rule it), there was a boy living in an
old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for himself, recruited
that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous force of religious
veneration such as had originally called them into being. More than a
century and a half had past since Tibullus had written; but the
restoration of religious usages, and their retention where they still
survived, was meantime come to be the fashion through the influence of
imperial example; and what had been in the main a matter of family
pride with his father, was sustained by a native instinct of devotion
in the young Marius. A sense of conscious powers external to
ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every
circumstance of daily life--that conscience, of which the old Roman
religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a
powerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly
puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly
in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the
Roman lad, as he passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the
lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an upright
stone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place. He
brought to that system of symbolic [6] usages, and they in turn
developed in him further, a great seriousness--an impressibility to the
sacredness of time, of life and its events, and the circumstances of
family fellowship; of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from
labour on which they live, really understood by him as gifts--a sense
of religious responsibility in the reception of them. It was a
religion for the most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a
year-long burden of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, for
instance) the thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome
channel for the almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and
relieved it as gratitude to the gods.

The day of the "little" or private Ambarvalia was come, to be
celebrated by a single family f