Yes! the interest, the expression, of the entire neighbourhood was instinct with it, as with the savour of some priceless incense.

Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all this visible mortality, death's very self--Ah! lovelier than any fable of old mythology had ever thought to render it, in the utmost limits of fantasy; and this, in simple candour of feeling about a supposed fact.
Peace! Pax tecum!--the word, the thought--was put forth everywhere, with images of hope, snatched sometimes from that jaded pagan world which had really afforded men so little of it from first to last; the various consoling images it had thrown off, of succour, of regeneration, of escape from the grave--Hercules wrestling with Death for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the Shepherd with his sheep, the Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his shoulders.

Yet these imageries after all, it must be confessed, formed but a slight contribution to the dominant effect of tranquil hope there--a kind of heroic cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart, as with the sense, again, of some real deliverance, which seemed to deepen the longer one lingered through these strange and awful passages.

A figure, partly pagan in character, yet most frequently repeated of all these visible parables--the figure of one just [104] escaped from the sea, still clinging as for life to the shore in surprised joy, together with the inscription beneath it, seemed best to express the prevailing sentiment of the place.

And it was just as he had puzzled out this inscription-- I went down to the bottom of the mountains.
The earth with her bars was about me for ever: Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption! -- that with no feeling of suddenness or change Marius found himself emerging again, like a later mystic traveller through similar dark places "quieted by hope," into the daylight.
They were still within the precincts of the house, still in possession of that wonderful singing, although almost in the open country, with a great view of the Campagna before them, and the hills beyond.