The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple.

And again this picture of a wayside inn: 

The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet.  The firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked lucernae burning cleanly with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in glass goblets.  The white wine of the place put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.

Those who judge of Pater’s writing by a few purple passages such as the famous rhapsody on the Mona Lisa, conceiving it as always thus heavy with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and particularly running water, “green fields—­or children’s faces.”  His lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme.  For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit.  In his preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of atmosphere which pervades his Marius, an atmosphere which might be termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, body-beauty as beautiful prose.

Considering Marius as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages.  Owing to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other way.  Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to employ in his imaginative treatment of human life.  All one asks is that the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and the story be told.  And Pater’s Marius entirely satisfies this demand for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal.  It is a real story, no mere German scholar’s attempt to animate the dry bones of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live