find his way in thought along those
streets of the old town, expecting duly the shrines at their corners,
and their recurrent intervals of garden-courts, or side-views of
distant sea. The great temple of the place, as he could remember it,
on turning back once for a last look from an angle of his homeward
road, counting its tall gray columns between the blue of the bay and
the blue fields of blossoming flax beyond; the harbour and its lights;
the foreign ships lying there; the sailors' chapel of Venus, and her
gilded image, hung with votive gifts; the seamen themselves, their
women and children, who had a whole peculiar colour-world of their
own--the boy's superficial delight in the broad light and shadow of all
that was mingled with the sense of power, of unknown distance, of the
danger of storm and possible death.

To this place, then, Marius came down now from White-nights, to live in
the house of his guardian or tutor, that he might attend the school of
a famous rhetorician, and learn, among [46] other things, Greek. The
school, one of many imitations of Plato's Academy in the old Athenian
garden, lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove of cypresses,
its porticoes, a house for the master, its chapel and images. For the
memory of Marius in after-days, a clear morning sunlight seemed to lie
perpetually on that severe picture in old gray and green. The lad went
to this school daily betimes, in state at first, with a young slave to
carry the books, and certainly with no reluctance, for the sight of his
fellow-scholars, and their petulant activity, coming upon the sadder
sentimental moods of his childhood, awoke at once that instinct of
emulation which is but the other side of sympathy; and he was not
aware, of course, how completely the difference of his previous
training had made him, even in his most enthusiastic participation in
the ways of that little world, still essentially but a spectator. While
all their heart was in their limited boyish race, and its transitory
prizes, he was already entertaining himself, very pleasurably
meditative, with the tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic,
preliminary exercise for a larger contest, and already with an implicit
epicureanism. Watching all the gallant effects of their small
rivalries--a scene in the main of fresh delightful sunshine--he entered
at once into the sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into the passion
of men, and had already recognised