To some such effect had this visit occurred to him, and through so slight an accident.

Rome and Roman life, just then, were come to seem like some stifling forest of bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet with roots in a deep, down-trodden soil of poignant human susceptibilities.

In the midst of its suffocation, that old longing for escape had been satisfied by this vision of the church in Cecilia's house, as never before.

It was still, indeed, according to the unchangeable law of his temperament, to the eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those experiences appealed--the peaceful light and shade, the boys whose very faces seemed to sing, the virginal beauty of the mother and her children.

But, in his case, what was thus visible constituted a moral [107] or spiritual influence, of a somewhat exigent and controlling character, added anew to life, a new element therein, with which, consistently with his own chosen maxim, he must make terms.
The thirst for every kind of experience, encouraged by a philosophy which taught that nothing was intrinsically great or small, good or evil, had ever been at strife in him with a hieratic refinement, in which the boy-priest survived, prompting always the selection of what was perfect of its kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of his soul thereto.