who, possessed of the "gold undefiled" of intellectual vision, forgo
so cheerfully all other riches. It was one of his happy days: one of
those rare days, when, almost with none of the effort, otherwise so
constant with him, his thoughts came rich and full, and converged in
a mental view, as exhilarating to him as the prospect of some wide
expanse of landscape to another man's bodily eye. He seemed to lie
readier than was his wont to the imaginative influence of the
philosophic reason--to its suggestions of a possible open country,
commencing just where all actual experience leaves off, but which
experience, one's own and not another's, may one day occupy. In
fact, he was seeking strength for himself, in his own way, before he
started for that ambiguous earthly warfare [37] which was to occupy
the remainder of his life. "Ever remember this," he writes, "that a
happy life depends, not on many things--en oligistois keitai."+ And
to-day, committing himself with a steady effort of volition to the
mere silence of the great empty apartments, he might be said to have
escaped, according to Plato's promise to those who live closely with
philosophy, from the evils of the world.

In his "conversations with himself" Marcus Aurelius speaks often of
that City on high, of which all other cities are but single
habitations. From him in fact Cornelius Fronto, in his late
discourse, had borrowed the expression; and he certainly meant by it
more than the whole commonwealth of Rome, in any idealisation of it,
however sublime. Incorporate somehow with the actual city whose
goodly stones were lying beneath his gaze, it was also implicate in
that reasonable constitution of nature, by devout contemplation of
which it is possible for man to associate himself to the
consciousness of God. In that New Rome he had taken up his rest for
awhile on this day, deliberately feeding his thoughts on the better