object of the soul in a career as pure, as concentrated, and as austere
as any that asceticism inspires. _Marius_ is an apology for the highest
Epicureanism, and at the same time it is a texture which the author has
embroidered with exquisite flowers of imagination, learning, and
passion. Modern humanism has produced no more admirable product than
this noble dream of a pursuit through life of the spirit of heavenly
beauty." Nothing could be more true, so far as it goes, than this
admirable paragraph, yet Pater's book is more than that. The main drift
of it is the reconciliation of Hellenism with Christianity in the
experience of a man "bent on living in the full stream of refined
sensation," who finds Christianity in every point fulfilling the ideals
of Epicureanism at its best.

The spiritual stages through which Marius passes on his journey towards
this goal are most delicately portrayed. In the main these are three,
which, though they recur and intertwine in his experience, yet may be
fairly stated in their natural order and sequence as normal types of
such spiritual progress.

The first of these stages is a certain vague fear of evil, which seems
to be conscience hardly aware of itself as such. It is "the sense of
some unexplored evil ever dogging his footsteps," which reached its
keenest poignancy in a constitutional horror of serpents, but which is a
very subtle and undefinable thing, observable rather as an undertone to
his consciousness of life than as anything tangible enough to be defined
or accounted for by particular causes. On the journey to Rome, the vague
misgivings took shape in one definite experience. "From the steep slope
a heavy mass of stone was detached, after some whisperings among the
trees above his head, and rushing down through the stillness fell to
pieces in a cloud of dust across the road just behind him, so that he