With what a fresh, primeval poetry was daily existence here impressed--all the details of the threshing-floor and the vineyard; [164] the common farm-life even; the great bakers' fires aglow upon the road in the evening.

In the presence of all this Marius felt for a moment like those old, early, unconscious poets, who created the famous Greek myths of Dionysus, and the Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and the ploughshare.

And still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form.

He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither.

The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the healthfully excited brain.--"It is wonderful," says Pliny, "how the mind is stirred to activity by brisk bodily exercise." The presentable aspects of inmost thought and feeling became evident to him: the structure of all he meant, its order and outline, defined itself: his general sense of a fitness and beauty in words became effective in daintily pliant sentences, with all sorts of felicitous linking of figure to abstraction.