ough an open
doorway into the temple itself. His heart bounded as the refined and
dainty magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood
of early sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there,
and withal a singular expression of sacred order, a surprising
cleanliness and simplicity. Certain priests, men whose countenances
bore a deep impression of cultivated mind, each with his little group
of assistants, were gliding round silently to perform their morning
salutation to the god, raising the closed thumb and finger of the right
hand with a kiss in the air, as they came and went on their sacred
business, bearing their frankincense and lustral water. Around the
walls, at such a level that the worshippers might read, as in a book,
the story of the god and his sons, the brotherhood of the Asclepiadae,
ran a series of imageries, in low relief, their delicate light and
shade being [38] heightened, here and there, with gold. Fullest of
inspired and sacred expression, as if in this place the chisel of the
artist had indeed dealt not with marble but with the very breath of
feeling and thought, was the scene in which the earliest generation of
the sons of Aesculapius were transformed into healing dreams; for
"grown now too glorious to abide longer among men, by the aid of their
sire they put away their mortal bodies, and came into another country,
yet not indeed into Elysium nor into the Islands of the Blest. But
being made like to the immortal gods, they began to pass about through
the world, changed thus far from their first form that they appear
eternally young, as many persons have seen them in many
places--ministers and heralds of their father, passing to and fro over
the earth, like gliding stars. Which thing is, indeed, the most
wonderful concerning them!" And in this scene, as throughout the
series, with all its crowded personages, Marius noted on the carved
faces the same peculiar union of unction, almost of hilarity, with a
certain self-possession and reserve, which was conspicuous in the
living ministrants around him.

In the central space, upon a pillar or pedestal, hung, ex voto, with
the richest personal ornaments, stood the image of Aesculapius himself,
surrounded by choice flowering plants. It presented the type, still
with something of the [39] severity of the earlier art of Greece about
it, not of an aged and crafty physician, but of a youth, earnest and
strong of aspect, car