But in these youthful years all things burst upon him with extraordinary
violence and ecstasy. His undulled senses swallowed greedily the whole
banquet offered by this wide world to his hunger for pleasure. The fugitive
beauty of things and beings, with all their charms, revealed itself to
him in its newness: _novissimarum rerum fugaces pulchritudines, earumque
suavitates_. This craving for sensation will still exist in the great
Christian teacher, and betray itself in the warm and coloured figures
of his style. Of course, he was not as a worldly describer, who studies
to produce phrases which present an image, or arranges glittering
pictures--all such endeavours he knew nothing about. But by instinct, and
thanks to his warm African temperament, he was a kind of impressionist and
metaphysical poet.

If the rural landscape of Thagaste is reflected in certain passages--the
pleasantest and most well known--of the _Confessions_, all the intellectual
part of Augustin's work finds its symbolical commentary here in this arid
and light-splashed plain of Madaura. Like it, the thought of Augustin has
no shadows. Like it too, it is lightened by strange and splendid tints
which seem to come from far off, from a focal fire invisible to human eyes.
No modern writer has better praised the light--not only the immortal light
of the blessed, but that light which rests on the African fields, and
is on land and sea; and nobody has spoken of it with more amplitude and
wonder. The truth is, that in no country in the world, not even in Egypt,
in the rose-coloured lands of Karnak and Luxor, is the light more pure and
admirable than in these great bare plains of Numidia and the region of the
Sahara. Is there not enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this
play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as
the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing--of
lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of
fluctuating light and elusive colour is quenched with the sun, smoulders