him; still however as in the main a poetic apprehension, though
united already with something of personal ambition and the instinct
of self-assertion. There were days when he could suspect, though it
was a suspicion he was careful at first to put from him, that that
early, much [44] cherished religion of the villa might come to count
with him as but one form of poetic beauty, or of the ideal, in
things; as but one voice, in a world where there were many voices it
would be a moral weakness not to listen to. And yet this voice,
through its forcible pre-occupation of his childish conscience, still
seemed to make a claim of a quite exclusive character, defining
itself as essentially one of but two possible leaders of his spirit,
the other proposing to him unlimited self-expansion in a world of
various sunshine. The contrast was so pronounced as to make the
easy, light-hearted, unsuspecting exercise of himself, among the
temptations of the new phase of life which had now begun, seem
nothing less than a rival religion, a rival religious service. The
temptations, the various sunshine, were those of the old town of
Pisa, where Marius was now a tall schoolboy. Pisa was a place lying
just far enough from home to make his rare visits to it in childhood
seem like adventures, such as had never failed to supply new and
refreshing impulses to the imagination. The partly decayed pensive
town, which still had its commerce by sea, and its fashion at the
bathing-season, had lent, at one time the vivid memory of its fair
streets of marble, at another the solemn outline of the dark hills of
Luna on its background, at another the living glances of its men and
women, to the thickly gathering crowd [45] of impressions, out of
which his notion of the world was then forming. And while he learned
that the object, the experience, as it will be known to memory, is
really from first to last the chief point for consideration in the
conduct of life, these things were feeding also the idealism