above all, on returning to the "chapel" of his mother, after long
days of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For poetic
souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the
pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its
generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail
is beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit
afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed
deeply in him; in the winters especially, when the sufferings of [22]
the animal world became so palpable even to the least observant. It
fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the almost human
troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It was a
feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for life as
such--for that mysterious essence which man is powerless to create in
even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of his mother,
the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for the hungry
wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told him once,
looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom
across a crowded public place--his own soul was like that! Would it
reach the hands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled
and unsoiled? And as his mother became to him the very type of
maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and
maternity itself the central type of all love;--so, that beautiful
dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar
ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid
many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.

And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced
still further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security.
His religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the really
light-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom,