adow of blue flowers; and lo! on the one level space of the
horizon, in a long dark line, were towers and a dome: and that was
Pisa.--Or Rome, was it? asked Marius, ready to believe the utmost, in
his excitement.

All this served, as he understood afterwards [41] in retrospect, at
once to strengthen and to purify a certain vein of character in him.
Developing the ideal, pre-existent there, of a religious beauty,
associated for the future with the exquisite splendour of the temple of
Aesculapius, as it dawned upon him on that morning of his first
visit--it developed that ideal in connexion with a vivid sense of the
value of mental and bodily sanity. And this recognition of the beauty,
even for the aesthetic sense, of mere bodily health, now acquired,
operated afterwards as an influence morally salutary, counteracting the
less desirable or hazardous tendencies of some phases of thought,
through which he was to pass.

He came home brown with health to find the health of his mother
failing; and about her death, which occurred not long afterwards, there
was a circumstance which rested with him as the cruellest touch of all,
in an event which for a time seemed to have taken the light out of the
sunshine. She died away from home, but sent for him at the last, with
a painful effort on her part, but to his great gratitude, pondering, as
he always believed, that he might chance otherwise to look back all his
life long upon a single fault with something like remorse, and find the
burden a great one. For it happened that, through some sudden,
incomprehensible petulance there had been an angry childish gesture,
and a slighting word, at the very moment of her departure, actually for
the last time. Remembering this [42] he would ever afterwards pray to
be saved from offences against his own affections; the thought of that
marred parting having peculiar bitterness for one, who set so much
store, both by principle and habit, on the sentiment of home.

NOTES

32. *[Transliteration:] E aporroe tou kallous. +Translation:
"Emanation from a thing of beauty."

CHAPTER IV: THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

O mare! O littus! verum secretumque Mouseion,+
quam multa invenitis, quam multa dictatis!
Pliny's Letters.

[43] IT would hardly have been possible to feel more seriously than did
Marius in those grave years of his early life. But the death of his
mother turned seriousness of feeling into a m