ame, the echoes, of it--like warbling birds, or murmuring bees.
Setting forth in that fine medium the best ideas of matured pagan
philosophy, he had become the favourite "director" of noble youth

Yes! it was the one instance Marius, always eagerly on the look-out for
such, had yet seen of [223] a perfectly tolerable, perfectly beautiful,
old age--an old age in which there seemed, to one who perhaps
habitually over-valued the expression of youth, nothing to be
regretted, nothing really lost, in what years had taken away. The wise
old man, whose blue eyes and fair skin were so delicate, uncontaminate
and clear, would seem to have replaced carefully and consciously each
natural trait of youth, as it departed from him, by an equivalent grace
of culture; and had the blitheness, the placid cheerfulness, as he had
also the infirmity, the claim on stronger people, of a delightful
child. And yet he seemed to be but awaiting his exit from life--that
moment with which the Stoics were almost as much preoccupied as the
Christians, however differently--and set Marius pondering on the
contrast between a placidity like this, at eighty years, and the sort
of desperateness he was aware of in his own manner of entertaining that
thought. His infirmities nevertheless had been painful and
long-continued, with losses of children, of pet grandchildren. What
with the crowd, and the wretched streets, it was a sign of affection
which had cost him something, for the old man to leave his own house at
all that day; and he was glad of the emperor's support, as he moved
from place to place among the children he protests so often to have
loved as his own.

For a strange piece of literary good fortune, at the beginning of the
present century, has set [224] free the long-buried fragrance of this
famous friendship of the old world, from below a valueless later
manuscript, in a series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange,
for the most part their evening thoughts, especially at family
anniversaries, and with entire intimacy, on their children, on the art
of speech, on all the various subtleties of the "science of
images"--rhetorical images--above all, of course, on sleep and matters
of health. They are full of mutual admiration of each other's
eloquence, restless in absence till they see one another again, noting,
characteristically, their very dreams of each other, expecting the day
which will terminate the office, the business or duty, whic