resisting, partly going along with the natural wildness and harshness
of the place, its floods and precipices. An air of immense age
possessed, above all, the vegetation around--a world of evergreen
trees--the olives especially, older than how many generations of
men's lives! fretted and twisted by the combining forces of [66] life
and death, into every conceivable caprice of form. In the windless
weather all seemed to be listening to the roar of the immemorial
waterfall, plunging down so unassociably among these human
habitations, and with a motion so unchanging from age to age as to
count, even in this time-worn place, as an image of unalterable rest.
Yet the clear sky all but broke to let through the ray which was
silently quickening everything in the late February afternoon, and
the unseen violet refined itself through the air. It was as if the
spirit of life in nature were but withholding any too precipitate
revelation of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work.

Through some accident to the trappings of his horse at the inn where
he rested, Marius had an unexpected delay. He sat down in an olive-
garden, and, all around him and within still turning to reverie, the
course of his own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself into some
other world, disparted from this spectacular point where he was now
placed to survey it, like that distant road below, along which he had
travelled this morning across the Campagna. Through a dreamy land he
could see himself moving, as if in another life, and like another
person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point
to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various dangers. That
prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude:
it was as if he must look round for some one [67] else to share his
joy with: for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own
relief. Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in