An exact estimate of realities, as towards himself, he must have--a delicately measured gradation of certainty in things--from the distant, haunted horizon of mere surmise or imagination, to the actual [127] feeling of sorrow in his heart, as he reclined one morning, alone instead of in pleasant company, to ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old Greek manuscript, unrolled beside him.

His former gay companions, meeting him in the streets of the old Italian town, and noting the graver lines coming into the face of the sombre but enthusiastic student of intellectual structure, who could hold his own so well in the society of accomplished older men, were half afraid of him, though proud to have him of their company.

Why this reserve ?--they asked, concerning the orderly, self-possessed youth, whose speech and carriage seemed so carefully measured, who was surely no poet like the rapt, dishevelled Lupus.

Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was so daintily folded, and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent on his own line of ambition: or even on riches?
Marius, meantime, was reading freely, in early morning for the most part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.
And the old Greek who more than any other was now giving form to his thoughts was a very hard master.

From Epicurus, from the thunder and lightning of Lucretius--like thunder and lightning some distance off, one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses--he had gone back to [128] the writer who was in a certain sense the teacher of both, Heraclitus of Ionia.