atter of the intelligence:
it made him a questioner; and, by bringing into full evidence to him
the force of his affections and the probable importance of their place
in his future, developed in him generally the more human and earthly
elements of character. A singularly virile consciousness of the
realities of life pronounced itself in him; still however as in the
main a poetic apprehension, though united already with something of
personal ambition and the instinct of self-assertion. There were days
when he could suspect, though it was a suspicion he was careful at
first to put from him, that that early, much [44] cherished religion of
the villa might come to count with him as but one form of poetic
beauty, or of the ideal, in things; as but one voice, in a world where
there were many voices it would be a moral weakness not to listen to.
And yet this voice, through its forcible pre-occupation of his childish
conscience, still seemed to make a claim of a quite exclusive
character, defining itself as essentially one of but two possible
leaders of his spirit, the other proposing to him unlimited
self-expansion in a world of various sunshine. The contrast was so
pronounced as to make the easy, light-hearted, unsuspecting exercise of
himself, among the temptations of the new phase of life which had now
begun, seem nothing less than a rival religion, a rival religious
service. The temptations, the various sunshine, were those of the old
town of Pisa, where Marius was now a tall schoolboy. Pisa was a place
lying just far enough from home to make his rare visits to it in
childhood seem like adventures, such as had never failed to supply new
and refreshing impulses to the imagination. The partly decayed pensive
town, which still had its commerce by sea, and its fashion at the
bathing-season, had lent, at one time the vivid memory of its fair
streets of marble, at another the solemn outline of the dark hills of
Luna on its background, at another the living glances of its men and
women, to the thickly gathering crowd [45] of impressions, out of which
his notion of the world was then forming. And while he learned that
the object, the experience, as it will be known to memory, is really
from first to last the chief point for consideration in the conduct of
life, these things were feeding also the idealism constitutional with
him--his innate and habitual longing for a world altogether fairer than
that he saw. The child could