The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically, very seductive.

Lastly, herb and tree had taken possession, spreading their seed-bells and light branches, just astir in the trembling air, above the ancient garden-wall, against the wide realms of sunset.

And from the first they could hear singing, the singing of children mainly, it would seem, and of a new kind; so novel indeed in its effect, as to bring suddenly to the recollection of Marius, Flavian's early essays towards a new world of poetic sound.

It was the expression not altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness--the blithe self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some all-subduing experience had wrought heroically, and who still remembered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance.
His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies, of places,--above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they might have,--was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by that peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion all around him, passed into the house.

That intelligent seriousness [97] about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those who lacked it into some strange species wholly alien from himself, accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision, into an actual picture.