citizen felt. It is, we might fancy, what the coming into possession
of a very widely spoken language might be, with a great literature,
which is also [27] the speech of the people we have to live among.

A wonderful order, actually in possession of human life!--grown
inextricably through and through it; penetrating into its laws, its
very language, its mere habits of decorum, in a thousand half-
conscious ways; yet still felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal;
and, as such, awakening hope, and an aim, identical with the one only
consistent aspiration of mankind! In the apprehension of that, just
then, Marius seemed to have joined company once more with his own old
self; to have overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to Rome,
with absolute sincerity, on the search for perfection. It defined
not so much a change of practice, as of sympathy--a new departure, an
expansion, of sympathy. It involved, certainly, some curtailment of
his liberty, in concession to the actual manner, the distinctions,
the enactments of that great crowd of admirable spirits, who have
elected so, and not otherwise, in their conduct of life, and are not
here to give one, so to term it, an "indulgence." But then, under
the supposition of their disapproval, no roses would ever seem worth
plucking again. The authority they exercised was like that of
classic taste--an influence so subtle, yet so real, as defining the
loyalty of the scholar; or of some beautiful and venerable ritual, in
which every observance is become spontaneous and almost mechanical,
yet is found, [28] the more carefully one considers it, to have a
reasonable significance and a natural history.

And Marius saw that he would be but an inconsistent Cyrenaic,
mistaken in his estimate of values, of loss and gain, and untrue to
the well-considered economy of life which he had brought with him to