There was in his work, along with the last splendour of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that transformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just about to dawn.

The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself with a feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seems to say, You have been just here, just thus, before!--a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent but prescient of the future, which passed over him afterwards many times, as he came across certain places and people.
It was as if he detected there the process of actual change to a wholly undreamed-of and renewed condition of human body and soul: as if he saw the heavy yet decrepit old Roman architecture about him, rebuilding on an intrinsically better pattern.

Could it have been actually on a new musical instrument that Flavian had first heard the novel accents of his verse?
And still Marius noticed there, amid all its richness of expression and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always relished so much in the composition of [115] Flavian.

Yes! a firmness like that of some master of noble metal-work, manipulating tenacious bronze or gold.

Even now that haunting refrain, with its impromptu variations, from the throats of those strong young men, came floating through the window.
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit cras amet! -- repeated Flavian, tremulously, dictating yet one stanza more.
What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and body so fortunately endowed, the mere liberty of life above-ground, "those sunny mornings in the cornfields by the sea," as he recollected them one day, when the window was thrown open upon the early freshness--his sense of all this, was from the first singularly near and distinct, yet rather as of something he was but debarred the use of for a time than finally bidding farewell to.