o, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones
of a poor man's grave!

Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the
philosopher's contempt for it--some diseased point of thought, or moral
dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all
the emperor's inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for which there
was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world. "'Tis part of the
business of life," he read, "to lose it handsomely." On due occasion,
"one might give life the slip." The moral or mental powers might fail
one; and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the time for
taking leave was not come:--"Thou canst leave this prison when thou
wilt. Go forth boldly!" Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain
such question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must
always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching
him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with. There,
surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of
apprehension. It was the [55] attitude, the melancholy intellectual
attitude, of one who might be greatly mistaken in things--who might
make the greatest of mistakes.

A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, or even in the
weakness of others:--of this Marius had certainly found the trace, as a
confidant of the emperor's conversations with himself, in spite of
those jarring inhumanities, of that pretension to a stoical
indifference, and the many difficulties of his manner of writing. He
found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger evidence, in this
way. As he read one morning early, there slipped from the rolls of
manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor's superscription, which
might well be of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at once in
person; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one of his favourite
retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with his young
children, before his departure for the war. A whole day passed as
Marius crossed the Campagna on horseback, pleased by the random autumn
lights bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture, the shepherds
in their picturesque dress, the golden elms, tower and villa; and it
was after dark that he mounted the steep street of the little hill-town
to the imperial residence. He was struck by an odd mixture of
stillness and excitement about the place. Lights burned at the
windows. It seemed th