f his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be
ever seeking to regain.

And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced still
further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security. His
religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the really
light-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom,
its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls [23]
of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always as the
prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as his
accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it;
and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made
him oddly suspicious of particular places and persons. Though his
liking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer,
as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and
ever afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for there
was something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep
uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almost
passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an
African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile
writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into
the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all
sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying
to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread
of a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand
into the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper.
A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have
killed or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the
very circumstance of their life, being what they [24] were. It was
something like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral
feeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or
feathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity
of aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity,
dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggish
coil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmity
against him. Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, a
second time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered the night which
had then foll