difference of his previous training had made him, even in his most
enthusiastic participation in the ways of that little world, still
essentially but a spectator. While all their heart was in their
limited boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was already
entertaining himself, very pleasurably meditative, with the tiny
drama in action before him, as but the mimic, preliminary exercise
for a larger contest, and already with an implicit epicureanism.
Watching all the gallant effects of their small rivalries--a scene in
the main of fresh delightful sunshine--he entered at once into the
sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into the passion of men, and had
already recognised a certain [47] appetite for fame, for distinction
among his fellows, as his dominant motive to be.

The fame he conceived for himself at this time was, as the reader
will have anticipated, of the intellectual order, that of a poet
perhaps. And as, in that gray monastic tranquillity of the villa,
inward voices from the reality of unseen things had come abundantly;
so here, with the sounds and aspects of the shore, and amid the
urbanities, the graceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was the
reality, the tyrannous reality, of things visible that was borne in
upon him. The real world around--a present humanity not less comely,
it might seem, than that of the old heroic days--endowing everything
it touched upon, however remotely, down to its little passing tricks
of fashion even, with a kind of fleeting beauty, exercised over him
just then a great fascination.

That sense had come upon him in all its power one exceptionally fine
summer, the summer when, at a somewhat earlier age than was usual, he
had formally assumed the dress of manhood, going into the Forum for
that purpose, accompanied by his friends in festal array. At night,