the ritual he had accomplished took him early away, that he might the
better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the celebration of
the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the influences
of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be moving in
procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That
feeling was still upon him as he [12] awoke amid the beating of
violent rain on the shutters, in the first storm of the season. The
thunder which startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of
his chamber almost painfully complete, as if the nearness of those
angry clouds shut him up in a close place alone in the world. Then
he thought of the sort of protection which that day's ceremonies
assured. To procure an agreement with the gods--Pacem deorum
exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day been busy
upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he would fain have
those Powers at least not against him. His own nearer household gods
were all around his bed. The spell of his religion as a part of the
very essence of home, its intimacy, its dignity and security, was
forcible at that moment; only, it seemed to involve certain heavy
demands upon him.



CHAPTER II: WHITE-NIGHTS

[13] To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the
childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt,
as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,--surely nothing
could happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or
reverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.*
"The red rose came first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of