It left in truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man.

"Let thine air be cheerful," he had said; and, with an effort, did himself at times attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely ought to accompany, as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like those.

Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable physiognomy.

With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human faces from "the land which is very far off," we may trace from Giotto onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael--the serenity, the [53] durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed "blitheness "of the Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth.

And yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching in the head or heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an enemy with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in a thousand forms--the apparent waste of men's gifts in an early, or even in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of animals; the disease and pain of the body.
And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius and his reader .-- The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body.