eagerly brought to share with Ned in their tavern corner one summer
evening in 1885.

Ned was late; but when Henry had sipped a little at his port, and turned
to the new-born exquisite pages, he hardly noticed how the minutes were
going by as he read. Presently he had come to the end of the first
volume, the only one he had with him, and he raised his eyes from the
closing page with that exquisite exaltation, that beatific satisfaction
of mind and spirit,--even almost one might say of body,--which for the
lover of literature nothing in the world like a fine passage can bring.

He turned again to the closing sentences: "_Yes; what was wanting was
the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the
future would be with the forces that would beget a heart like that. His
favourite philosophy had said, Trust the eye. Strive to be right always,
regarding the concrete experience. Never falsify your impressions. And
its sanction had been at least effective here, in saying: It is what I
may not see! Surely, evil was a real thing; and the wise man wanting in
the sense of it, where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the
right side was to have failed in life_."

The passage referred to the Roman gladiatorial shows, and to the
philosophic detachment by which Marcus Aurelius was able to see and yet
not to see them; and the whole book was the spiritual story of a young
Roman's soul, a priestlike artistic temperament, born in the haunted
twilight between the setting sun of pagan religion and philosophy and
the dawn of the Christian idea. The theme presented many fascinating
analogies to the present time; and in the hero's "sensations and ideas"
Henry found many correspondences with his own nature. In him, too, was
united that same joy in the sensuous form, that same adoration of the