under our courier's protection and in my brother's company--it came just
there and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. The bliss
in fact I think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense of
a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and
leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames
themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features
of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed
air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing
again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness.
_That_, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm--to feel
afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning in short
was with Gericault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread;
so that one's stretched, one's even strained, perceptions, one's
discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great
premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many
circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dim
reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile
though I might still be, during which the house of life and the palace
of art became so mixed and interchangeable--the Louvre being, under a
general description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than the
most hushed of all temples--that an excursion to look at pictures would
have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked
and looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's moon-borne
Madonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands,
treasures of the Salon Carre as that display was then composed; but I
had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America
as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a
still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners,
types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty
sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as I
supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (in
especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable
Seine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility felt
itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the
friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were at any rate some
of the vague processes--I