Marius followed with a devout interest, sincerely touched and awed by
his mother's sorrow. After the deification of the emperors, we are
told, it was considered impious so much as to use any coarse
expression in the presence of their images. To Marius the whole of
life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar
collectedness. The severe and archaic religion of the villa, as he
conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout circumspection lest he
should fall short at any point of the demand upon him of anything
[18] in which deity was concerned. He must satisfy with a kind of
sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest he be found wanting to,
the claims of others, in their joys and calamities--the happiness
which deity sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself felt.
And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world of
men and things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on
his side, came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept
him serious and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in
after years much engrossed him, and when he had learned to think of
all religions as indifferent, serious amid many fopperies and through
many languid days, and made him anticipate all his life long as a
thing towards which he must carefully train himself, some great
occasion of self-devotion, such as really came, that should
consecrate his life, and, it might be, its memory with others, as the
early Christian looked forward to martyrdom at the end of his course,
as a seal of worth upon it.

The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his
first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the
face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from
the white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat
steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow