Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/111

English and the Italian character in the later times; the perfection of Marius by means of a Greek ideal may run parallel with English culture under southern influences. There was, too, in Roman character a trait or two which brings it near to qualities that lie at the base of our own stock. Even in the Italian landscape there are Northern notes such as Mr. Pater mentions when Marius, in his walks to the coast, sees "the marsh with the dwarf roses and wild lavender, the abandoned boat, the ruined floodgates, the flock of wild birds." We are told, also, that "poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is beating hard without." This note of Marius's home-life and the love he had for it, with his particular regard for "Domiduca, the goddess who watches over one's safe coming home," and with the ideal of maternity that grew up in his memory of home,—this peculiarly English note is struck in the opening and is dominant at the end. Certain other characteristics ally this Etrurian boy with that nobler strain of