moment with a greeting for Cornelius.

That visionary scene was the close, the fitting close, of the
afternoon's strange experiences. A few minutes later, passing
forward on his way along the public road, he could have fancied it a
dream. The house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious
house he had lately visited at Tusculum. And what a contrast was
presented by the former, in its suggestions of hopeful industry, of
immaculate cleanness, of responsive affection!--all alike determined
by that transporting discovery of some fact, or series [106] of
facts, in which the old puzzle of life had found its solution. In
truth, one of his most characteristic and constant traits had ever
been a certain longing for escape--for some sudden, relieving
interchange, across the very spaces of life, it might be, along which
he had lingered most pleasantly--for a lifting, from time to time, of
the actual horizon. It was like the necessity under which the
painter finds himself, to set a window or open doorway in the
background of his picture; or like a sick man's longing for northern
coolness, and the whispering willow-trees, amid the breathless
evergreen forests of the south. To some such effect had this visit
occurred to him, and through so slight an accident. Rome and Roman
life, just then, were come to seem like some stifling forest of
bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the
generations of living trees, yet with roots in a deep, down-trodden
soil of poignant human susceptibilities. In the midst of its
suffocation, that old longing for escape had been satisfied by this
vision of the church in Cecilia's house, as never before. It was
still, indeed, according to the unchangeable law of his temperament,
to the eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those experiences
appealed--the peaceful light and shade, the boys whose very faces