transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth. And
yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with the bold recognition
of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching in the head or
heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an enemy with
whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in a
thousand forms--the apparent waste of men's gifts in an early, or
even in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of
animals; the disease and pain of the body.

And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius and his
reader.--The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body. Since
it is "the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and
to be proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither
sensation nor passion to break in upon her," it follows that the true
interest of the spirit must ever be to treat the body--Well! as a
corpse attached thereto, rather than as a living companion--nay,
actually to promote its dissolution. In counterpoise to the
inhumanity of this, presenting itself to the young reader as nothing
less than a sin against nature, the very person of Cornelius was
nothing less than a sanction of that reverent delight Marius had
always had in the visible body of man. Such delight indeed had been
but [54] a natural consequence of the sensuous or materialistic
character of the philosophy of his choice. Now to Cornelius the body
of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer terms it, the one true
temple in the world; or rather itself the proper object of worship,
of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold might have its
seemliness and due symbolic use:--Ah! and of what awe-stricken pity
also, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones of a poor man's
grave!