he saw, a second time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered the
night which had then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein,
on the real greatness of those little troubles of children, of which
older people make light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he
reflected how richly possessed his life had actually been by
beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing how greatly what was
repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace.

Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to
contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an
earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his
solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions
of the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination,
and became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something
of an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure
from within, by the exercise [25] of meditative power. A vein of
subjective philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all
things, there would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world
and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other
men's valuations. And the generation of this peculiar element in his
temper he could trace up to the days when his life had been so like
the reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a word for
unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to
it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the spirit in which
he prepared himself for the sacerdotal function hereditary in his
family--the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the
strenuous self-control and ascesis, which such preparation involved.
Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of the play of Euripides,
who every morning sweeps the temple floor with such a fund of
cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in sacred places,