ect by the love of visible beauty." The discourse was
conceived from the point of view of a theory Marius found afterwards in
Plato's Phaedrus, which supposes men's spirits susceptible to certain
influences, diffused, after the manner of streams or currents, by fair
things or persons visibly present--green fields, for instance, or
children's faces--into the air around them, acting, in the case of some
peculiar natures, like potent material essences, and conforming the
seer to themselves as with some cunning physical necessity. This
theory,* in itself so fantastic, had however determined in a range of
methodical suggestions, altogether quaint here and there from their
circumstantial minuteness. And throughout, the possibility of some
vision, as of a new city coming down "like a bride out of heaven," a
vision still indeed, it might seem, a long way off, but to be granted
perhaps one day to the eyes thus trained, was presented as the motive
of this laboriously practical direction.

"If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some fresh
picture, in a clear [33] light," so the discourse recommenced after a
pause, "be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in all
things, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows." To keep the eye
clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness,
extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and
more fastidiously, select form and colour in things from what was less
select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more
especially, connected with the period of youth--on children at play in
the morning, the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the
fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by him if it were
but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token
and representative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid
jealously, in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight;
and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse in the
range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circumstance at
any cost of place, money, or opportunity; such were in brief outline
the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula of
life. And it was delivered with conviction; as if the speaker verily
saw into the recesses of the mental and physical being of the listener,
while his own expression of perfect temperance had in it a fascinating
power--the