him by a runner still swift of
foot: for a moment he experienced a singular curiosity, almost an
ardent desire to enter upon a future, the possibilities of which seemed
so large.

And just then, again amid the memory of certain touching actual words
and images, came the thought of the great hope, that hope against hope,
which, as he conceived, had arisen--Lux sedentibus in tenebris+--upon
the aged world; the hope Cornelius had seemed to bear away upon him in
his strength, with a buoyancy which had caused Marius to feel, not so
much that by a caprice of destiny, he had been left to die in his
place, as that Cornelius was gone on a mission to deliver him also from
death. There had been a permanent protest established in the world, a
plea, a perpetual after-thought, which humanity henceforth would ever
possess in reserve, against any wholly mechanical and disheartening
theory of itself and its conditions. That was a thought which relieved
for him the iron outline of the horizon about him, touching it as if
with soft light from beyond; filling the shadowy, hollow places to
which he was on his way with the warmth of definite affections;
confirming also certain considerations by which he seemed to link
himself to the generations to come in the world he was leaving. Yes!
through the survival of their children, happy parents are able to [222]
think calmly, and with a very practical affection, of a world in which
they are to have no direct share; planting with a cheerful good-humour,
the acorns they carry about with them, that their grand-children may be
shaded from the sun by the broad oak-trees of the future. That is
nature's way of easing death to us. It was thus too, surprised,
delighted, that Marius, under the power of that new hope among men,
could think of the generations to come after him. Without it, dim in
truth as it was, he could hardly have dared to ponder the world which
limited all he really knew, as it would be when he should have departed
from it. A strange lonesomeness, like physical darkness, seemed to
settle upon the thought of it; as if its business hereafter must be, as
far as he was concerned, carried on in some inhabited, but distant and
alien, star. Contrariwise, with the sense of that hope warm about him,
he seemed to anticipate some kindly care for himself; never to fail
even on earth, a care for his very body-that dear sister and companion
of his soul, outworn, suffering, and in the very article of