seem, for some one had entered the room bearing a light. The
footsteps of the youthful figure which approached and sat by his
bedside were certainly real. Ever afterwards, when the thought arose
in his mind of some unhoped-for but entire relief from distress, like
blue sky in a storm at sea, would come back the memory of that
gracious countenance which, amid all the kindness of its gaze, had
yet a certain air of predominance over him, so that he seemed now for
the first time to have found the master of his spirit. It would have
been sweet to be the servant of him who now sat beside him speaking.

He caught a lesson from what was then said, still somewhat beyond his
years, a lesson in the skilled cultivation of life, of experience, of
opportunity, which seemed to be the aim of the young priest's
recommendations. The sum of them, through various forgotten
intervals of argument, as might really have happened in a [32] dream,
was the precept, repeated many times under slightly varied aspects,
of a diligent promotion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in
the eye would lie for him the determining influence of life: he was
of the number of those who, in the words of a poet who came long
after, must be "made perfect by the love of visible beauty." The
discourse was conceived from the point of view of a theory Marius
found afterwards in Plato's Phaedrus, which supposes men's spirits
susceptible to certain influences, diffused, after the manner of
streams or currents, by fair things or persons visibly present--green
fields, for instance, or children's faces--into the air around them,
acting, in the case of some peculiar natures, like potent material
essences, and conforming the seer to themselves as with some cunning
physical necessity. This theory,* in itself so fantastic, had
however determined in a range of methodical suggestions, altogether
quaint here and there from their circumstantial minuteness. And