as they passed through the rich light and shadow of a summer morning,
along the pavement of a city--Ah! fairer far than Rome! In a moment,
as he arose, a certain oppression of late setting very heavily upon
him was lifted away, as though by some physical motion in the air.

That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasurable excitement,
yet so easily ruffled by chance collision even with the things and
persons he had come to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to
be wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards Tibur, under the
early sunshine; the marble of its villas glistening all the way
before him on the hillside. And why could he not hold such serenity
of spirit ever at command? he asked, expert as he was at last become
in the art of setting the house of his thoughts in order. "'Tis in
thy power to think as thou wilt:" he repeated to himself: it was the
most serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him by those imperial
conversations.--"'Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt." And were
the cheerful, sociable, restorative beliefs, of which he had there
read so much, that bold adhesion, for instance, to the hypothesis of
an eternal friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical
and material order, but only just behind it, [64] ready perhaps even
now to break through:--were they, after all, really a matter of
choice, dependent on some deliberate act of volition on his part?
Were they doctrines one might take for granted, generously take for
granted, and led on by them, at first as but well-defined objects of
hope, come at last into the region of a corresponding certitude of
the intellect? "It is the truth I seek," he had read, "the truth, by
which no one," gray and depressing though it might seem, "was ever
really injured." And yet, on the other hand, the imperial wayfarer,
he had been able to go along with so far on his intellectual
pilgrimage, let fall many things concerning the practicability of a