olive-clad rocks below, the novices were taking their exercise. The
softly sloping sides of the vale lay alike in full sunlight; and its
distant opening was closed by a beautifully formed mountain, from
which the last wreaths of morning mist were rising under the heat.
It might have seemed the very presentment of a land of hope, its
hollows brimful of a shadow of blue flowers; and lo! on the one level
space of the horizon, in a long dark line, were towers and a dome:
and that was Pisa.--Or Rome, was it? asked Marius, ready to believe
the utmost, in his excitement.

All this served, as he understood afterwards [41] in retrospect, at
once to strengthen and to purify a certain vein of character in him.
Developing the ideal, pre-existent there, of a religious beauty,
associated for the future with the exquisite splendour of the temple
of Aesculapius, as it dawned upon him on that morning of his first
visit--it developed that ideal in connexion with a vivid sense of the
value of mental and bodily sanity. And this recognition of the
beauty, even for the aesthetic sense, of mere bodily health, now
acquired, operated afterwards as an influence morally salutary,
counteracting the less desirable or hazardous tendencies of some
phases of thought, through which he was to pass.

He came home brown with health to find the health of his mother
failing; and about her death, which occurred not long afterwards,
there was a circumstance which rested with him as the cruellest touch
of all, in an event which for a time seemed to have taken the light
out of the sunshine. She died away from home, but sent for him at
the last, with a painful effort on her part, but to his great
gratitude, pondering, as he always believed, that he might chance
otherwise to look back all his life long upon a single fault with