ughts
as a too depressing element in life. To Florian such impressions,
these misgivings as to the ultimate tendency of the years, of the
relationship between life and death, had been suggested spontaneously
in the natural course of his mental growth by a strong innate sense for
the soberer tones in things, further strengthened by actual
circumstances; and religious sentiment, that [193] system of biblical
ideas in which he had been brought up, presented itself to him as a
thing that might soften and dignify, and light up as with a "lively
hope," a melancholy already deeply settled in him. So he yielded
himself easily to religious impressions, and with a kind of mystical
appetite for sacred things; the more as they came to him through a
saintly person who loved him tenderly, and believed that this early
pre-occupation with them already marked the child out for a saint. He
began to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy days, all that
belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white
linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic
purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to
have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious
books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel
grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells
and pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron's vestment, sounding
sweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place. His way of
conceiving religion came then to be in effect what it ever afterwards
remained--a sacred history indeed, but still more a sacred ideal, a
transcendent version or representation, under intenser and more
expressive light and shade, of human life and its familiar or
exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, [194] youth, age, tears,
joy, rest, sleep, waking--a mirror, towards which men might turn away
their eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves therein as
angels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind of sacred
transaction--a complementary strain or burden, applied to our every-day
existence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves,
and fall into the scheme of some higher and more consistent harmony. A
place adumbrated itself in his thoughts, wherein those sacred
personalities, which are at once the reflex and the pattern of our
nobler phases of life, housed themselves; and this regi