th it, as with the savour of
some priceless incense. Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching
everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all
this visible mortality, death's very self--Ah! lovelier than any fable
of old mythology had ever thought to render it, in the utmost limits of
fantasy; and this, in simple candour of feeling about a supposed fact.
Peace! Pax tecum!--the word, the thought--was put forth everywhere,
with images of hope, snatched sometimes from that jaded pagan world
which had really afforded men so little of it from first to last; the
various consoling images it had thrown off, of succour, of
regeneration, of escape from the grave--Hercules wrestling with Death
for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the
Shepherd with his sheep, the Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his
shoulders. Yet these imageries after all, it must be confessed, formed
but a slight contribution to the dominant effect of tranquil hope
there--a kind of heroic cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart,
as with the sense, again, of some real deliverance, which seemed to
deepen the longer one lingered through these strange and awful
passages. A figure, partly pagan in character, yet most frequently
repeated of all these visible parables--the figure of one just [104]
escaped from the sea, still clinging as for life to the shore in
surprised joy, together with the inscription beneath it, seemed best to
express the prevailing sentiment of the place. And it was just as he
had puzzled out this inscription--

I went down to the bottom of the mountains.
The earth with her bars was about me for ever:
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption!

--that with no feeling of suddenness or change Marius found himself
emerging again, like a later mystic traveller through similar dark
places "quieted by hope," into the daylight.

They were still within the precincts of the house, still in possession
of that wonderful singing, although almost in the open country, with a
great view of the Campagna before them, and the hills beyond. The
orchard or meadow, through which their path lay, was already gray with
twilight, though the western sky, where the greater stars were visible,
was still afloat in crimson splendour. The colour of all earthly
things seemed repressed by the contrast, yet with a sense of great
richness lingering in their shadows. At that moment the voice of the