With a prayer, therefore, for inward quiet, for conformity to the divine reason, he read some select passages of Plato, which bear upon the harmony of the reason, in all its forms, with itself--"Could there be Cosmos, that wonderful, reasonable order, in him, and nothing but disorder in the world without ?" It was from this question he had passed on to the vision of a reasonable, a divine, order, not in nature, but in the condition of human affairs--that unseen Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs Beata--in which, a consciousness of the divine will being everywhere realised, there would be, among other felicitous differences from this lower visible world, no more quite hopeless death, of men, or children, or of their affections.

He had tried to-day, as never before, to make the most of this vision of a New Rome, to realise it as distinctly as he could,--and, as it were, find his way along its streets, ere he went down into a world so irksomely different, to make his practical effort towards it, with a soul full of [40] compassion for men as they were.
However distinct the mental image might have been to him, with the descent of but one flight of steps into the market-place below, it must have retreated again, as if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond the utmost verge of the horizon.

But it had been actually, in his clearest vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable entry, a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose novel expression he, the great physiognomist, could by no means read.
Plato, indeed, had been able to articulate, to see, at least in thought, his ideal city.

But just because Aurelius had passed beyond Plato, in the scope of the gracious charities he pre-supposed there, he had been unable really to track his way about it.

Ah! after all, according to Plato himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this, his heart's desire, no place his soul could ever have visited in any region of the old world's achievements.