ordinary and natural life--would remain upon it, perhaps for many
days. There were experiences he could not forget, intuitions beyond
price, he had come by in this way, which were almost like the
breaking of a physical light upon his mind; as the great Augustus was
said to have seen a mysterious physical splendour, yonder, upon the
summit of the Capitol, where the altar of the Sibyl now stood. With
a prayer, therefore, for inward quiet, for conformity to the divine
reason, he read some select passages of Plato, which bear upon the
harmony of the reason, in all its forms, with itself--"Could there be
Cosmos, that wonderful, reasonable order, in him, and nothing but
disorder in the world without?" It was from this question he had
passed on to the vision of a reasonable, a divine, order, not in
nature, but in the condition of human affairs--that unseen Celestial
City, Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs Beata--in which, a consciousness
of the divine will being everywhere realised, there would be, among
other felicitous differences from this lower visible world, no more
quite hopeless death, of men, or children, or of their affections.
He had tried to-day, as never before, to make the most of this vision
of a New Rome, to realise it as distinctly as he could,--and, as it
were, find his way along its streets, ere he went down into a world
so irksomely different, to make his practical effort towards it, with
a soul full of [40] compassion for men as they were. However
distinct the mental image might have been to him, with the descent of
but one flight of steps into the market-place below, it must have
retreated again, as if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond the
utmost verge of the horizon. But it had been actually, in his
clearest vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable
entry, a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted by strange
faces, whose novel expression he, the great physiognomist, could by
no means read. Plato, indeed, had been able to articulate, to see,