recurrence of the thing--that unchanged
outline below the coverlet, amid a silence in which the faintest rustle
seemed to speak--that finally overcame his determination. Surely,
here, in this alienation, this sense of distance between them, which
had come over him before though in minor degree when the mind of
Flavian had wandered in his sickness, was another of the pains of
death. Yet he was able to make all due preparations, and go through
the ceremonies, shortened a little because of the infection, when, on a
cloudless evening, the funeral procession went forth; himself, the
flames of the pyre having done their work, carrying away the urn of the
deceased, in the folds of his toga, to its last resting-place in the
cemetery beside the highway, and so turning home to sleep in his own
desolate lodging.

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis?--+

What thought of others' thoughts about one could there be with the
regret for "so dear a head" fresh at one's heart?

NOTES

116. +Lucretius, Book VI.1153.

120. +Horace, Odes I.xxiv.1-2.

PART THE SECOND

CHAPTER VIII: ANIMULA VAGULA

Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Pallidula, rigida, nudula.

The Emperor Hadrian to his Soul

[123] FLAVIAN was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and
tears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actual
spectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for the
imagination, whatever confidence they may entertain of the soul's
survival in another life. To Marius, greatly agitated by that event,
the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing less
than the soul's extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as the
fire among those still beloved ashes. Even that wistful suspense of
judgment expressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages of
being still possible for the soul in some dim journey hence, seemed
wholly untenable, and, with it, almost all that remained of the
religion of his childhood. Future extinction seemed just then [124] to
be what the unforced witness of his own nature pointed to. On the other
hand, there came a novel curiosity as to what the various schools of
ancient philosophy had had to say concerning that strange, fluttering
creature; and that curiosity impelled him to certain severe studies, in
which his earlier religious conscience