But whence the strange confidence that these "handfuls of white dust" would hereafter recompose themselves once more into exulting human creatures?
By what heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew from above, such as was certainly never again to reach the dead violets?
-- [101] Januarius, Agapetus, Felicitas; Martyrs! refresh, I pray you, the soul of Cecil, of Cornelius! said an inscription, one of many, scratched, like a passing sigh, when it was still fresh in the mortar that had closed up the prison-door.

All critical estimate of this bold hope, as sincere apparently as it was audacious in its claim, being set aside, here at least, carried further than ever before, was that pious, systematic commemoration of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal to forget or finally desert the helpless, had ever counted with Marius as the central exponent or symbol of all natural duty.
The stern soul of the excellent Jonathan Edwards, applying the faulty theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we know, the vision of infants not a span long, on the floor of hell.

Every visitor to the Catacombs must have observed, in a very different theological connexion, the numerous children's graves there--beds of infants, but a span long indeed, lowly "prisoners of hope," on these sacred floors.
It was with great curiosity, certainly, that Marius considered them, decked in some instances with the favourite toys of their tiny occupants--toy-soldiers, little chariot-wheels, the entire paraphernalia of a baby-house; and when he saw afterwards the living children, who sang and were busy above--sang their psalm Laudate Pueri Dominum!--their very faces caught for him a sort of quaint unreality from the memory [102] of those others, the children of the Catacombs, but a little way below them.
Here and there, mingling with the record of merely natural decease, and sometimes even at these children's graves, were the signs of violent death or "martyrdom,"-- proofs that some "had loved not their lives unto the death"-- in the little red phial of blood, the palm-branch, the red flowers for their heavenly "birthday." About one sepulchre in particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly arrayed for what, by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia--a birthday, the peculiar arrangements of the whole place visibly centered.

And it was with a singular novelty of feeling, like the dawning of a fresh order of experiences upon him, that, standing beside those mournful relics, snatched in haste from the common place of execution not many years before, Marius became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the whole force of evidence for a certain strange, new hope, defining in its turn some new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so tragic for the "Christian superstition." Something of them he had heard indeed already.

They had seemed to him but one savagery the more, savagery self-provoked, in a cruel and stupid world.
And yet these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards to-day, as if towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering, [103] in the remote background.