any fable of old mythology had ever thought to render it, in the
utmost limits of fantasy; and this, in simple candour of feeling
about a supposed fact. Peace! Pax tecum!--the word, the thought--was
put forth everywhere, with images of hope, snatched sometimes from
that jaded pagan world which had really afforded men so little of it
from first to last; the various consoling images it had thrown off,
of succour, of regeneration, of escape from the grave--Hercules
wrestling with Death for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the
wild beasts, the Shepherd with his sheep, the Shepherd carrying the
sick lamb upon his shoulders. Yet these imageries after all, it must
be confessed, formed but a slight contribution to the dominant effect
of tranquil hope there--a kind of heroic cheerfulness and grateful
expansion of heart, as with the sense, again, of some real
deliverance, which seemed to deepen the longer one lingered through
these strange and awful passages. A figure, partly pagan in
character, yet most frequently repeated of all these visible
parables--the figure of one just [104] escaped from the sea, still
clinging as for life to the shore in surprised joy, together with the
inscription beneath it, seemed best to express the prevailing
sentiment of the place. And it was just as he had puzzled out this
inscription--

I went down to the bottom of the mountains.
The earth with her bars was about me for ever:
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption!

--that with no feeling of suddenness or change Marius found himself
emerging again, like a later mystic traveller through similar dark
places "quieted by hope," into the daylight.