like one of those old joyful wakings of childhood, now becoming rarer
and rarer with him, and looked back upon with much regret as a measure
of advancing age. In fact, [63] the last bequest of this serene sleep
had been a dream, in which, as once before, he overheard those he loved
best pronouncing his name very pleasantly, as they passed through the
rich light and shadow of a summer morning, along the pavement of a
city--Ah! fairer far than Rome! In a moment, as he arose, a certain
oppression of late setting very heavily upon him was lifted away, as
though by some physical motion in the air.

That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasurable excitement,
yet so easily ruffled by chance collision even with the things and
persons he had come to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to
be wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards Tibur, under the
early sunshine; the marble of its villas glistening all the way before
him on the hillside. And why could he not hold such serenity of spirit
ever at command? he asked, expert as he was at last become in the art
of setting the house of his thoughts in order. "'Tis in thy power to
think as thou wilt:" he repeated to himself: it was the most
serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him by those imperial
conversations.--"'Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt." And were
the cheerful, sociable, restorative beliefs, of which he had there read
so much, that bold adhesion, for instance, to the hypothesis of an
eternal friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and
material order, but only just behind it, [64] ready perhaps even now to
break through:--were they, after all, really a matter of choice,
dependent on some deliberate act of volition on his part? Were they
doctrines one might take for granted, generously take for granted, and
led on by them, at first as but well-defined objects of hope, come at
last into the region of a corresponding certitude of the intellect?
"It is the truth I seek," he had read, "the truth, by which no one,"
gray and depressing though it might seem, "was ever really injured."
And yet, on the other hand, the imperial wayfarer, he had been able to
go along with so far on his intellectual pilgrimage, let fall many
things concerning the practicability of a methodical and self-forced
assent to certain principles or presuppositions "one could not do
without." Were there, as the expression "one could not do without"
see