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Marius the Epicurean — Volume 2 by Walter Pater
page 68 of 169 (40%)
at last lifted, and, with strange contrast to his visit to the poet's
villa at Tusculum, he entered another curious house.

"The house in which she lives," says that mystical German writer
quoted once before, "is for the orderly soul, which does not live on
[93] blindly before her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences,
building and adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for herself,
only an expansion of the body; as the body, according to the
philosophy of Swedenborg,+ is but a process, an expansion, of the
soul. For such an orderly soul, as life proceeds, all sorts of
delicate affinities establish themselves, between herself and the
doors and passage-ways, the lights and shadows, of her outward
dwelling-place, until she may seem incorporate with it--until at
last, in the entire expressiveness of what is outward, there is for
her, to speak properly, between outward and inward, no longer any
distinction at all; and the light which creeps at a particular hour
on a particular picture or space upon the wall, the scent of flowers
in the air at a particular window, become to her, not so much
apprehended objects, as themselves powers of apprehension and door-
ways to things beyond--the germ or rudiment of certain new faculties,
by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a matter lying beyond her
actually attained capacities of spirit and sense."

So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we may think,
together with that bodily "tent" or "tabernacle," only one of many
vestures for the clothing of the pilgrim soul, to be left by her,
surely, as if on the wayside, worn-out one by one, as it was from
her, indeed, they borrowed what momentary value or significance they
had.

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