living in an old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for
himself, recruited that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous
force of religious veneration such as had originally called them into
being. More than a century and a half had past since Tibullus had
written; but the restoration of religious usages, and their retention
where they still survived, was meantime come to be the fashion
through the influence of imperial example; and what had been in the
main a matter of family pride with his father, was sustained by a
native instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A sense of
conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the
right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily life--that
conscience, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual
recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and
observance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the power of
which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry,
had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the
spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck dead an
aged labourer in the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering
garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that system of
symbolic [6] usages, and they in turn developed in him further, a
great seriousness--an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of
life and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship; of
such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour on which
they live, really understood by him as gifts--a sense of religious
responsibility in the reception of them. It was a religion for the
most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long burden
of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, for instance) the
thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome channel for the
almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and relieved it
as gratitude to the gods.