tion to impart, the art,
namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, [54] the elements
of distinction, in our everyday life--of so exclusively living in
them--that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or debris of
our days, comes to be as though it were not. And the consciousness of
this aim came with the reading of one particular book, then fresh in
the world, with which he fell in about this time--a book which awakened
the poetic or romantic capacity as perhaps some other book might have
done, but was peculiar in giving it a direction emphatically sensuous.
It made him, in that visionary reception of every-day life, the seer,
more especially, of a revelation in colour and form. If our modern
education, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind
of idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as its
professed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of
ancient literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened
also, long ago, with Marius and his friend.

NOTES

43. +Transliteration: Mouseion. The word means "seat of the muses."
Translation: "O sea! O shore! my own Helicon, / How many things have
you uncovered to me, how many things suggested!" Pliny, Letters, Book
I, ix, to Minicius Fundanus.

50. +Transliteration: hoia theous epenenothen aien eontas. Translation:
"such as the gods are endowed with." Homer, Odyssey, 8.365.

CHAPTER V: THE GOLDEN BOOK

[55] THE two lads were lounging together over a book, half-buried in a
heap of dry corn, in an old granary--the quiet corner to which they had
climbed out of the way of their noisier companions on one of their
blandest holiday afternoons. They looked round: the western sun smote
through the broad chinks of the shutters. How like a picture! and it
was precisely the scene described in what they were reading, with just
that added poetic touch in the book which made it delightful and
select, and, in the actual place, the ray of sunlight transforming the
rough grain among the cool brown shadows into heaps of gold. What they
were intent on was, indeed, the book of books, the "golden" book of
that day, a gift to Flavian, as was shown by the purple writing on the
handsome yellow wrapper, following the title Flaviane!--it said,

Flaviane! lege Felicitur!
Flaviane! Vivas! Fioreas!
Flaviane! Vivas! Gaudeas!

[56] It was perfumed with oil of sandal-wood, and decorated with carved