l purpose, in itself, aesthetically, very
seductive. Lastly, herb and tree had taken possession, spreading their
seed-bells and light branches, just astir in the trembling air, above
the ancient garden-wall, against the wide realms of sunset. And from
the first they could hear singing, the singing of children mainly, it
would seem, and of a new kind; so novel indeed in its effect, as to
bring suddenly to the recollection of Marius, Flavian's early essays
towards a new world of poetic sound. It was the expression not
altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness--the
blithe self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some
all-subduing experience had wrought heroically, and who still
remembered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance.

His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies, of
places,--above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they
might have,--was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by that
peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion
all around him, passed into the house. That intelligent seriousness
[97] about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those
who lacked it into some strange species wholly alien from himself,
accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days
at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed
congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision,
into an actual picture. If the true value of souls is in proportion to
what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul. As he
passed through the various chambers, great and small, one dominant
thought increased upon him, the thought of chaste women and their
children--of all the various affections of family life under its most
natural conditions, yet developed, as if in devout imitation of some
sublime new type of it, into large controlling passions. There reigned
throughout, an order and purity, an orderly disposition, as if by way
of making ready for some gracious spousals. The place itself was like
a bride adorned for her husband; and its singular cheerfulness, the
abundant light everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which he
received a deep impression though without precisely reckoning wherein
it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast just at
first to the place to which he was next conducted by Cornelius still
with a