Ned was late; but when Henry had sipped a little at his port, and turned to the new-born exquisite pages, he hardly noticed how the minutes were going by as he read.  Presently he had come to the end of the first volume, the only one he had with him, and he raised his eyes from the closing page with that exquisite exaltation, that beatific satisfaction of mind and spirit,—­even almost one might say of body,—­which for the lover of literature nothing in the world like a fine passage can bring.

He turned again to the closing sentences:  “Yes; what was wanting was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with the forces that would beget a heart like that.  His favourite philosophy had said, Trust the eye.  Strive to be right always, regarding the concrete experience.  Never falsify your impressions.  And its sanction had been at least effective here, in saying:  It is what I may not see!  Surely, evil was a real thing; and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side was to have failed in life.”

The passage referred to the Roman gladiatorial shows, and to the philosophic detachment by which Marcus Aurelius was able to see and yet not to see them; and the whole book was the spiritual story of a young Roman’s soul, a priestlike artistic temperament, born in the haunted twilight between the setting sun of pagan religion and philosophy and the dawn of the Christian idea.  The theme presented many fascinating analogies to the present time; and in the hero’s “sensations and ideas” Henry found many correspondences with his own nature.  In him, too, was united that same joy in the sensuous form, that same adoration of the spiritual mystery, the temperaments in one of artist and priest.  He, too, in a dim fashion indeed, and under conditions of culture less favourable, had speculated and experimented in a similar manner upon the literary art over which as yet he had acquired—­how crushingly this exquisite book taught him—­such pathetically uncertain mastery.  That impassioned comradeship in books beautiful, was it not to-day Ned’s and his, as all those years before it had been that of Marius and Flavian?

And where in the world was Ned?  How he would kindle at a passage like this:  “To keep the eye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and more exactly, select form and colour in things from what was less select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth,—­on children at play in the morning, the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by him, if it were but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token and representation of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid jealously, in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight; and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse in the range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circumstance at any cost of place, money, or opportunity:  such were, in brief outline, the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula of life.”