His natural precocity had been seized as the engine to force his
faculties into a perilous and unwholesome maturity; and when his new
duties demanded his attention, he entered on them with the same
sincerity of enthusiasm which his boyish coevals would have exhibited
towards a new sport. His gradual initiation into the mysteries of his
religion created a strange, voluptuous sensation of fear and interest in
his mind. He heard the oracles, and he trembled; he attended the
sacrifices and the auguries, and he wondered. All the poetry of the
bold and beautiful superstition to which he was devoted flowed
overwhelmingly into his young heart, absorbing the service of his fresh
imagination, and transporting him incessantly from the vital realities
of the outer world to the shadowy regions of aspiration and thought.
But his duties did not entirely occupy the attention of Ulpius. The boy
had his peculiar pleasures as well as his peculiar occupations. When
his employments were over for the day, it was a strange, unearthly,
vital enjoyment to him to wander softly in the shade of the temple
porticoes, looking down from his great mysterious eminence upon the
populous and sun-brightened city at his feet; watching the brilliant
expanse of the waters of the Nile glittering joyfully in the dazzling
and pervading light; raising his eyes from the fields and woods, the
palaces and garden, that stretched out before him below, to the lovely
and cloudless sky that watched round him afar and above, and that awoke
all that his new duties had left of the joyfulness, the affectionate
sensibility, which his rare intervals of uninterrupted intercourse with
his mother had implanted in his heart.
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