gracious charities he pre-supposed there, he
had been unable really to track his way about it. Ah! after all,
according to Plato himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this,
his heart's desire, no place his soul could ever have visited in any
region of the old world's achievements. He had but divined, by a kind
of generosity of spirit, the void place, which another experience than
his must fill.

Yet Marius noted the wonderful expression of peace, of quiet pleasure,
on the countenance of Aurelius, as he received from him the rolls of
fine clear manuscript, fancying the thoughts of the emperor occupied at
the moment with the famous prospect towards the Alban hills, from those
lofty windows.

NOTES

37. +Transliteration: en oligistois keitai. Definition "it lies in
the fewest [things]."

CHAPTER XVIII: "THE CEREMONY OF THE DART"

[41] THE ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aurelius, ideas of
large generalisation, have sometimes induced, in those over whose
intellects they have had real power, a coldness of heart. It was the
distinction of Aurelius that he was able to harmonise them with the
kindness, one might almost say the amenities, of a humourist, as also
with the popular religion and its many gods. Those vasty conceptions
of the later Greek philosophy had in them, in truth, the germ of a sort
of austerely opinionative "natural theology," and how often has that
led to religious dryness--a hard contempt of everything in religion,
which touches the senses, or charms the fancy, or really concerns the
affections. Aurelius had made his own the secret of passing,
naturally, and with no violence to his thought, to and fro, between the
richly coloured and romantic religion of those old gods who had still
been human beings, and a very abstract speculation upon the impassive,
[42] universal soul--that circle whose centre is everywhere, the
circumference nowhere--of which a series of purely logical necessities
had evolved the formula. As in many another instance, those
traditional pieties of the place and the hour had been derived by him
from his mother:--para tes metros to theosebes.+ Purified, as all such
religion of concrete time and place needs to be, by frequent
confronting with the ideal of godhead as revealed to that innate
religious sense in the possession of which Aurelius differed from the
people around him, it was the ground of many a sociability with their
simpler souls, and for himself