To Hester and Clara...

Χειμερινὸςὄνειρος, ὅτε μήκισται αἱ νύκτες1...

As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism⁠—the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so...

As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism⁠—the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so...

To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place⁠—surely nothing...

That almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of the country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of a journey, which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to a ce...

It would hardly have been possible to feel more seriously than did Marius in those grave years of his early life. But the death of his mother turned seriousness of feeling into a matter of the intelli...

The two lads were lounging together over a book, half-buried in a heap of dry corn, in an old granary⁠—the quiet corner to which they had climbed out of the way of their noisier companions on one of t...

So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius, with an expression changed in some ways from the original and on the whole graver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more l...

For the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor Marcus Aurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in his train, among the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive. People act...

Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and tears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actual spectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for the i...

Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and tears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actual spectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for the i...

Such were the practical conclusions drawn for himself by Marius, when somewhat later he had outgrown the mastery of others, from the principle that “all is vanity.” If he could but count upon the pres...

Many points in that train of thought, its harder and more energetic practical details especially, at first surmised but vaguely in the intervals of his visits to the tomb of Flavian, attained the cohe...

Marius awoke early and passed curiously from room to room, noting for more careful inspection by and by the rolls of manuscripts. Even greater than his curiosity in gazing for the first time on this a...

Marcus Aurelius who, though he had little relish for them himself, had ever been willing to humour the taste of his people for magnificent spectacles, was received back to Rome with the lesser honours...

After that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at work, softening leaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness in the air; but he did his work behind an evenly white sky, against which th...

During the Eastern war there came a moment when schism in the empire had seemed possible through the defection of Lucius Verus; when to Aurelius it had also seemed possible to confirm his allegiance b...

The very finest flower of the same company⁠—Aurelius with the gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina herself, and all the elegant bluestockings of the day, who mai...

The very finest flower of the same company⁠—Aurelius with the gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina herself, and all the elegant bluestockings of the day, who mai...

And Marius, for his part, was grave enough. The discourse of Cornelius Fronto, with its wide prospect over the human, the spiritual, horizon, had set him on a review⁠—on a review of the isolating narr...

The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the vanguard of the mighty invading hosts of the fifth century. Illusively repressed just now, those confused movements along the northern boundary of the Empi...

The ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aurelius, ideas of large generalisation, have sometimes induced, in those over whose intellects they have had real power, a coldness of heart. It was the d...

The emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of images in memory of the dead prince; that a golden one should be carried, together with the other images, in the great procession of the Ci...

A nature like that of Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of instincts almost physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual judgments, was perhaps even less susceptible than other men’s charact...

A nature like that of Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of instincts almost physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual judgments, was perhaps even less susceptible than other men’s charact...

A nature like that of Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of instincts almost physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual judgments, was perhaps even less susceptible than other men’s charact...

Cornelius had certain friends in or near Rome, whose household, to Marius, as he pondered now and again what might be the determining influences of that peculiar character, presented itself as possibl...

Cornelius had certain friends in or near Rome, whose household, to Marius, as he pondered now and again what might be the determining influences of that peculiar character, presented itself as possibl...

Faithful to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy and the impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to anything that, as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him ...

The more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present instances of the summing up of an entire world of complex associations under some single form, like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of fresc...

In cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says Pliny⁠—studia hilaritate proveniunt. It was still the habit of Marius, encouraged by his experience that sleep is not only a sedative but the best o...

It was become a habit with Marius⁠—one of his modernisms⁠—developed by his assistance at the Emperor’s “conversations with himself,” to keep a register of the movements of his own private thoughts and...

The charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections, wonderfully fresh in the midst of a threadbare world, would have led Marius, if nothing else had done so, again and again, to Cecilia’s house. He f...

Not many months after the date of that epistle, Marius, then expecting to leave Rome for a long time, and in fact about to leave it forever, stood to witness the triumphal entry of Marcus Aurelius, al...

Those eight days at his old home, so mournfully occupied, had been for Marius in some sort a forcible disruption from the world and the roots of his life in it. He had been carried out of himself as n...

“A winter’s dream, when nights are longest.” Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3. —⁠Drake ↩ Ad Vigilias Albas. ↩ Ἡ ἀπορρόη τοῦ καλλοῦς. “Emanation from a thing of beauty.” —⁠Drake ↩ The word means “seat of the ...