the claim of Humanity became so amiable, winning, persuasive--whose
footsteps through the world were so beautiful in the actual order he
saw--whose faces averted from him, would be more than he could bear?
Where was that comely order, to which as a great fact of experience
he must give its due; to which, as to all other beautiful "phenomena"
in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust himself?

Rome did well to be serious. The discourse ended somewhat abruptly,
as the noise of a great crowd in motion was heard below the walls;
whereupon, the audience, following the humour of the younger element
in it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which the famous
procession, or transvectio, of the military knights was to be seen
passing over the Forum, from their trysting-place at the temple of
Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri. The ceremony took place this
year, not on the day accustomed--anniversary of the victory of Lake
Regillus, with its pair of celestial assistants--and amid the heat
and roses of a Roman July, but, by [13] anticipation, some months
earlier, the almond-trees along the way being still in leafless
flower. Through that light trellis-work, Marius watched the riders,
arrayed in all their gleaming ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive
around their helmets, the faces below which, what with battle and the
plague, were almost all youthful. It was a flowery scene enough, but
had to-day its fulness of war-like meaning; the return of the army to
the North, where the enemy was again upon the move, being now
imminent. Cornelius had ridden along in his place, and, on the
dismissal of the company, passed below the steps where Marius stood,
with that new song he had heard once before floating from his lips.

NOTES