Marius felt for a moment like those old, early,
unconscious poets, who created the famous Greek myths of Dionysus, and
the Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and the
ploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing his
thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness of
intellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literary
stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had always
observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of
thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the
healthfully excited brain.--"It is wonderful," says Pliny, "how the
mind is stirred to activity by brisk bodily exercise." The presentable
aspects of inmost thought and feeling became evident to him: the
structure of all he meant, its order and outline, defined itself: his
general sense of a fitness and beauty in words became effective in
daintily pliant sentences, with all sorts of felicitous linking of
figure to abstraction. It seemed just then as if the desire of the
artist in him--that old longing to produce--might be satisfied by the
exact and literal transcript of what was then passing around him, in
simple prose, arresting the desirable moment as it passed, and
prolonging its life a little.--To live in the concrete! To be sure, at
least, of [165] one's hold upon that!--Again, his philosophic scheme
was but the reflection of the data of sense, and chiefly of sight, a
reduction to the abstract, of the brilliant road he travelled on,
through the sunshine.

But on the seventh evening there came a reaction in the cheerful flow
of our traveller's thoughts, a reaction with which mere bodily fatigue,
asserting itself at last over his curiosity, had much to do; and he
fell into a mood, known to all passably sentimental wayfarers, as night
deepens again and again over their path, in which all journeying, from
the known to the unknown, comes suddenly to figure as a mere foolish
truancy--like a child's running away from home--with the feeling that
one had best return at once, even through the darkness. He had chosen
to climb on foot, at his leisure, the long windings by which the road
ascended to the place where that day's stage was to end, and found
himself alone in the twilight, far behind the rest of his
travelling-companions. Would the last zigzag, round and round those
dark masses, half natural rock, half artificial substructure,