“The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape—the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse temple of _Venus Speciosa_ on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers.... The air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.” There is a beautiful passage about the boy’s simple pursuits:— “The ramble to the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and delightful signs, one after another—the abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild birds—that one was approaching the sea; the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds.” The house itself has the perfect Italian charm:— “Lying away from the white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age ... beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds had forced their way.” The boy grows up in an intense meditative cloistered mood, with a scrupulous conscience carefully fostered by his mother. “A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul was like that!” There is a traditional, inherited priesthood in the family, and the boy has a deep liturgical and ritual preoccupation; he is happiest in sacred places, and is conscious all his life, even in the midst of worldly distractions, of “a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct of life.” Perhaps it may be said that the ritual element, the pleasure in processions, and ordered hymns, and ceremonies and symbols is a little over-weighted. There is a sense of unreality, a lack of lifelikeness, about the dramatic intentness with which the functions described are carried out; the devout temper of the central figure, of Marius himself, is too definitely presupposed in the worshippers. We shall have occasion to advert to this point again; but in this first part the spectacle of the religious ceremonies so tenderly and quaintly described gives one the feeling that one is watching the movements of the well-drilled _supers_ of a play, rather than the unconstrained movement of actual life.