marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender,
and delightful signs, one after another--the abandoned boat, the ruined
flood-gates, the flock of wild birds--that one was approaching the sea;
the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds. And
it was characteristic of him that he relished especially the grave,
subdued, northern notes in all that--the charm of the French or English
notes, as we might term them--in the luxuriant Italian landscape.

NOTES

13. *Ad Vigilias Albas.

CHAPTER III: CHANGE OF AIR

Dilexi decorem domus tuae.

[27] THAT almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of
the country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of a
journey, which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to a
certain temple of Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was then
usual in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. The
religion of Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been
naturalised in Rome in the old republican times; but had reached under
the Antonines the height of its popularity throughout the Roman world.
That was an age of valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginary
ones; but below its various crazes concerning health and disease,
largely multiplied a few years after the time of which I am speaking by
the miseries of a great pestilence, lay a valuable, because partly
practicable, belief that all the maladies of the soul might be reached
through the subtle gateways of the body.

[28] Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean bodily sanity.
The religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator, as they called him
absolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one religion; that
mild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing, all other
pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral
or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to
have a kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more
serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health,
beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming
truly, in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthood
or "family" of Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be in
possession of certain precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps,
of all the institutions of the pagan world, to the Christian
priesthood; the temples of the god, rich in some instances with the