CHAPTER XXIII: DIVINE SERVICE.
"Wisdom hath builded herself a house: she hath mingled her wine: she hath also prepared for herself a table." [128] THE more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present instances of the summing up of an entire world of complex associations under some single form, like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of frescoes which commemorate The Acts of Saint Francis, at Assisi, or like the play of Hamlet or Faust.

It was not in an image, or series of images, yet still in a sort of dramatic action, and with the unity of a single appeal to eye and ear, that Marius about this time found all his new impressions set forth, regarding what he had already recognised, intellectually, as for him at least the most beautiful thing in the world.
To understand the influence upon him of what follows the reader must remember that it was an experience which came amid a deep sense of vacuity in life.

The fairest products of [129] the earth seemed to be dropping to pieces, as if in men's very hands, around him.

How real was their sorrow, and his! "His observation of life" had come to be like the constant telling of a sorrowful rosary, day after day; till, as if taking infection from the cloudy sorrow of the mind, the eye also, the very senses, were grown faint and sick.

And now it happened as with the actual morning on which he found himself a spectator of this new thing.