this first hazy idea he would fain
have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes, thinking and
musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by the gnawing pain
of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence, individual or national,
to which these pledges bore witness, ended by numbing his senses--the
purpose with which he entered the shop was fulfilled. He had left the
real behind, and had climbed gradually up to an ideal world; he had
attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy, whence the universe
appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of flame, as once the future
blazed out before the eyes of St. John in Patmos.

A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and luminous,
far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole generations.
Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the form of a mummy
swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed up nations, that
they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld Moses and the Hebrews
and the desert, and a solemn antique world. Fresh and joyous, a marble
statue spoke to him from a twisted column of the pleasure-loving myths
of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see,
against the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with
gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an
Etruscan vase? The Latin queen caressed her chimera.

The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
Livius. The young man beheld _Senatus Populusque Romanus_; consuls,
lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the angry
people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a dream.

Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among
the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers of
sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At the
touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, his
fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at Borgia's
orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love intrigues,
grew ardent over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He shi