guided by a wonderful tact of selection, exclusion, juxtaposition,
begetting thereby a unique effect of freshness, a grave yet wholesome
beauty, because the world of sense, the whole outward world was
understood to set forth the veritable unction and royalty of a
certain priesthood and kingship of the soul within, among the
prerogatives of which was a delightful sense of freedom.

The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was,
had his visionary [117] aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato's
peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have
descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and
anticipated Christian poetry and art as they came to be under the
influence of Saint Francis of Assisi. But if he dreamed on one of
those nights of the beautiful house of Cecilia, its lights and
flowers, of Cecilia herself moving among the lilies, with an enhanced
grace as happens sometimes in healthy dreams, it was indeed hardly an
anticipation. He had lighted, by one of the peculiar intellectual
good-fortunes of his life, upon a period when, even more than in the
days of austere ascesis which had preceded and were to follow it, the
church was true for a moment, truer perhaps than she would ever be
again, to that element of profound serenity in the soul of her
Founder, which reflected the eternal goodwill of God to man, "in
whom," according to the oldest version of the angelic message, "He is
well-pleased."

For what Christianity did many centuries afterwards in the way of
informing an art, a poetry, of graver and higher beauty, we may
think, than that of Greek art and poetry at their best, was in truth
conformable to the original tendency of its genius. The genuine
capacity of the catholic church in this direction, discoverable from