ome of his equals in age and rank. The sober
discretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation, the
sense of those negative conclusions enabling him to concentrate
himself, with an absorption so entire, upon what is immediately here
and now, gave him a peculiar manner of intellectual confidence, as of
one who had indeed been initiated into a great secret.--Though with an
air so disengaged, he seemed to be living so intently in the visible
world! And now, in revolt against that pre-occupation with other
persons, which had so often perturbed his spirit, his wistful
speculations as to what the real, the greater, experience might be,
determined in him, not as the longing for love--to be with Cynthia, or
Aspasia--but as a thirst for existence in exquisite places. The veil
that was to be lifted for him lay over the works of the old masters of
art, in places where nature also had used her mastery. And it was just
at this moment that a summons to Rome reached him.

NOTES

145. +Canto VI.

147. +Transliteration: paideia. Definition "rearing, education."

149. +Transliteration: theoria. Definition "a looking at ...
observing ... contemplation."

154. +Transliteration: monochronos hedone. Pater's definition "the
pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now." The definition is
fitting; the unusual adjective monokhronos means, literally, "single or
unitary time."

155. +Horace, Ars Poetica 311. +Etext editor's translation: "The
subject once foreknown, the words will follow easily."

CHAPTER X: ON THE WAY

Mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur.
Pliny's Letters.

[158] MANY points in that train of thought, its harder and more
energetic practical details especially, at first surmised but vaguely
in the intervals of his visits to the tomb of Flavian, attained the
coherence of formal principle amid the stirring incidents of the
journey, which took him, still in all the buoyancy of his nineteen
years and greatly expectant, to Rome. That summons had come from one
of the former friends of his father in the capital, who had kept
himself acquainted with the lad's progress, and, assured of his parts,
his courtly ways, above all of his beautiful penmanship, now offered
him a place, virtually that of an amanuensis, near the person of the
philosophic emperor. The old town-house of his family on the Caelian
hill, so long neglected, mig