Watching all the gallant effects of their small rivalries--a scene in the main of fresh delightful sunshine--he entered at once into the sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into the passion of men, and had already recognised a certain [47] appetite for fame, for distinction among his fellows, as his dominant motive to be.
The fame he conceived for himself at this time was, as the reader will have anticipated, of the intellectual order, that of a poet perhaps.
And as, in that gray monastic tranquillity of the villa, inward voices from the reality of unseen things had come abundantly; so here, with the sounds and aspects of the shore, and amid the urbanities, the graceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was the reality, the tyrannous reality, of things visible that was borne in upon him.

The real world around--a present humanity not less comely, it might seem, than that of the old heroic days--endowing everything it touched upon, however remotely, down to its little passing tricks of fashion even, with a kind of fleeting beauty, exercised over him just then a great fascination.
That sense had come upon him in all its power one exceptionally fine summer, the summer when, at a somewhat earlier age than was usual, he had formally assumed the dress of manhood, going into the Forum for that purpose, accompanied by his friends in festal array.

At night, after the full measure of those cloudless days, he would feel well-nigh wearied out, as if with a long succession of pictures and music.

As he wandered through the gay streets or on the sea-shore, the real world seemed indeed boundless, and himself almost absolutely free in it, with a boundless [48] appetite for experience, for adventure, whether physical or of the spirit.

His entire rearing hitherto had lent itself to an imaginative exaltation of the past; but now the spectacle actually afforded to his untired and freely open senses, suggested the reflection that the present had, it might be, really advanced beyond the past, and he was ready to boast in the very fact that it was modern.