e in truth as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge,
and I recall how I felt this note in his own case to belong to that
general intimation with which the whole air was charged of the want of
proportion between the great spaces and reaches and echoes commanded,
the great eminence attained, and the quantity and variety of experience
supposable. So to discriminate was in a manner to put one's hand on the
key, and thereby to find one's self in presence of a rare and anomalous,
but still scarcely the less beautiful fact. The assured and achieved
conditions, the serenity, the security, the success, to put it vulgarly,
shone in the light of their easiest law--that by which they emerge early
from the complication of life, the great adventure of sensibility, and
find themselves determined once for all, fortunately fixed, all
consecrated and consecrating. If I should speak of this impression as
that of glory without history, that of the poetic character more worn
than paid for, or at least more saved than spent, I should doubtless
much over-emphasise; but such, or something like it, was none the less
the explanation that met one's own fond fancy of the scene after one had
cast about for it. For I allow myself thus to repeat that I was so moved
to cast about, and perhaps at no moment more than during the friendly
analysis of the reputation of M. de Sade. Was I not present at some
undreamed-of demonstration of the absence of the remoter real, the real
other than immediate and exquisite, other than guaranteed and enclosed,
in landscape, friendship, fame, above all in consciousness of awaited
and admired and self-consistent inspiration?

The question was indeed to be effectively answered for me, and
everything meanwhile continued to play into this prevision--even to the
pleasant growling note heard behind me, as the Bard followed with Mrs.
Greville, who had permitted herself apparently some mild extravagance of
homage: "Oh yes, you may do what you like--so long as you don't kiss me
before the cabman!" The allusion was explained for us, if I remember--a
matter of some more or less recent leave-taking of admirer and admired
in London on his putting her down at her door after being taken to the
play or wherever; between the rugged humour of which reference and the
other just commemorated there wasn't a pin to choose, it struck me, for
a certain old-time Lincolnshire ease or comfortable stay-at-home
license. But it was later on, wh