a certain [47] appetite for fame,
for distinction among his fellows, as his dominant motive to be.

The fame he conceived for himself at this time was, as the reader will
have anticipated, of the intellectual order, that of a poet perhaps.
And as, in that gray monastic tranquillity of the villa, inward voices
from the reality of unseen things had come abundantly; so here, with
the sounds and aspects of the shore, and amid the urbanities, the
graceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was the reality, the tyrannous
reality, of things visible that was borne in upon him. The real world
around--a present humanity not less comely, it might seem, than that of
the old heroic days--endowing everything it touched upon, however
remotely, down to its little passing tricks of fashion even, with a
kind of fleeting beauty, exercised over him just then a great
fascination.

That sense had come upon him in all its power one exceptionally fine
summer, the summer when, at a somewhat earlier age than was usual, he
had formally assumed the dress of manhood, going into the Forum for
that purpose, accompanied by his friends in festal array. At night,
after the full measure of those cloudless days, he would feel well-nigh
wearied out, as if with a long succession of pictures and music. As he
wandered through the gay streets or on the sea-shore, the real world
seemed indeed boundless, and himself almost absolutely free in it, with
a boundless [48] appetite for experience, for adventure, whether
physical or of the spirit. His entire rearing hitherto had lent itself
to an imaginative exaltation of the past; but now the spectacle
actually afforded to his untired and freely open senses, suggested the
reflection that the present had, it might be, really advanced beyond
the past, and he was ready to boast in the very fact that it was
modern. If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of that day went
back to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of a
fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature, and even,
as we have seen, of religion, at least it improved, by a shade or two
of more scrupulous finish, on the old pattern; and the new era, like
the Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our own
century, might perhaps be discerned, awaiting one just a single step
onward--the perfected new manner, in the consummation of time, alike as
regards the things of the imagination and the actual conduct of lif