emper of a devotee.

As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetry
had passed away, [126] to be replaced by the literature of thought. His
much-pondered manuscript verses were laid aside; and what happened now
to one, who was certainly to be something of a poet from first to last,
looked at the moment like a change from poetry to prose. He came of
age about this time, his own master though with beardless face; and at
eighteen, an age at which, then as now, many youths of capacity, who
fancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from others chiefly in
affectation and vague dreaming, he secluded himself indeed from others,
but in a severe intellectual meditation, that salt of poetry, without
which all the more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative world.
Still with something of the old religious earnestness of his childhood,
he set himself--Sich im Denken zu orientiren--to determine his
bearings, as by compass, in the world of thought--to get that precise
acquaintance with the creative intelligence itself, its structure and
capacities, its relation to other parts of himself and to other things,
without which, certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young man
rich in this world's goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, and
ascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact estimate
of realities, as towards himself, he must have--a delicately measured
gradation of certainty in things--from the distant, haunted horizon of
mere surmise or imagination, to the actual [127] feeling of sorrow in
his heart, as he reclined one morning, alone instead of in pleasant
company, to ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old Greek
manuscript, unrolled beside him. His former gay companions, meeting
him in the streets of the old Italian town, and noting the graver lines
coming into the face of the sombre but enthusiastic student of
intellectual structure, who could hold his own so well in the society
of accomplished older men, were half afraid of him, though proud to
have him of their company. Why this reserve?--they asked, concerning
the orderly, self-possessed youth, whose speech and carriage seemed so
carefully measured, who was surely no poet like the rapt, dishevelled
Lupus. Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was so daintily
folded, and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent on
his own line of ambition: or even on riches?

Marius, meantime, was re