Marius the Epicurean, vol 1 | Page 6

from the sands of which it was drawn up
in a fisherman's net, with the fine golden laminae still clinging here and
there to the bronze. It was Marcellus also who had contrived the
prospect-tower of two storeys with the white pigeon-house above, so
characteristic of the place. The little glazed windows in the uppermost
chamber framed each its dainty landscape--the pallid crags of Carrara,
like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant
harbour with its freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse
temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn
curves of white breakers. Even on summer nights the air there had
always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay along
all the passages of the house.
Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral
or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the
whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar
sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the
deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can

give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them--the
"subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for which many a
Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still
in the land of the living. Certainly, if any [21] such considerations
regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that
secondary existence, that warm place still left, in thought at least,
beside the living, the desire for which is actually, in various forms, so
great a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, even thus
early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands to lay one to
rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural want. The
soft lines of the white hands and face, set among the many folds of the
veil and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with
music sometimes, defined themselves for him as the typical expression
of maternity. Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring
for her musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such
things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying duly his
country-grown habits--the sense of a certain delicate blandness, which
he relished, above all, on returning to the "chapel" of his mother, after
long days of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For poetic
souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the
pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its
generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is
beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit afterwards in his
Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the
winters especially, when the sufferings of [22] the animal world
became so palpable even to the least observant. It fixed in him a
sympathy for all creatures, for the almost human troubles and
sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which had in it
something of religious veneration for life as such--for that mysterious
essence which man is powerless to create in even the feeblest degree.
One by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his
cherished traps and springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh.
A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which
he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place--his own soul
was like that! Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the
opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled? And as his mother became to
him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and

protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;--so, that
beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar
ideal of home, which throughout the rest of 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