He had been permitted no childhood either of thought or action.

His natural precocity had been seized as the engine to force his faculties into a perilous and unwholesome maturity; and when his new duties demanded his attention, he entered on them with the same sincerity of enthusiasm which his boyish coevals would have exhibited towards a new sport.

His gradual initiation into the mysteries of his religion created a strange, voluptuous sensation of fear and interest in his mind.

He heard the oracles, and he trembled; he attended the sacrifices and the auguries, and he wondered.

All the poetry of the bold and beautiful superstition to which he was devoted flowed overwhelmingly into his young heart, absorbing the service of his fresh imagination, and transporting him incessantly from the vital realities of the outer world to the shadowy regions of aspiration and thought.
But his duties did not entirely occupy the attention of Ulpius.