All the Roman knew, all he could realise, was that the spring was gone long ago, with her buds of promise, and her laughing morning skies; that the glory of summer had passed away, with its lustrous beauty and its burnished plains, and its deep dark foliage quivering in the heat; that the blast of autumn had strewn the cold earth now with faded flowers and withered leaves, and all the wreck of all the hopes that blossomed so tenderly, and bloomed so bright and fair. The heaven was cold and grey, and between him and heaven the bare branches waved and nodded, mocking, pointing with spectral fingers to the dull cheerless sky. Could he but have believed, could he but have vaguely imaged to himself that there would come another spring; that belief, that vague imagining, had been to Licinius the one inestimable treasure for which he would have bartered all else in the world.
In vain he sought, and looked about him for something on which to lean; for something out of, and superior to himself, inspiring him with that sense of being protected, for which humanity feels so keen, yet so indefinite, a desire. What is the bravest and wisest of mankind, but a child in the dark, groping for the parental hand that shall guide its uncertain steps? Where was he to find the ideal that he could honestly worship, on the superiority of which he could heartily depend? The mythology of Rome, degraded as it had become, was not yet stripped of all the graceful attributes it owed to its Hellenic origin. That which was Greek, might indeed be evil, yet it could scarce fail to be fair; but what rational man could ground his faith on the theocracy of Olympus, or contemplate with any feeling save disgust that material Pantheism, in which the lowest even of human vices was exalted into a divinity? As well become a worshipper of Isis at once, and prostitute, to the utter degradation of the body, all the noblest and fairest imagery of the mind. No, the deities that Homer sang were fit subjects for the march of those Greek hexameters, sonorous and majestic as the roll of the Ægean sea; fit types of sensuous perfection, to be wrought by the Greek chisel, from out the veined blocks of smooth, white Parian stone; but for man, intellectual man, to bow down before the crafty Hermes, or the thick‐witted god of forges, or the ambrosial front of father Jove himself, the least ideal of all, was a simple absurdity, that could scarce impose upon a woman or a child.