th its own dim little plea, as I turn to face them, but
my idea is to deal somehow more conveniently with the whole gathered
mass of my subsequent impressions in this order, a fruitage that I feel
to have been only too abundantly stored. Half a dozen of those of a
larger and more immediate dignity, incidents more particularly of the
rather invidiously so-called social contact, pull my sleeve as I pass;
but the long, backward-drawn train of the later life drags them along
with it, lost and smothered in its spread--only one of them stands out
or remains over, insisting on its place and hour, its felt
distinguishability. To this day I feel again _that_ roused emotion, my
unsurpassably prized admission to the presence of the great George
Eliot, whom I was taken to see, by one of the kind door-opening Norton
ladies, by whom Mrs. Lewes's guarded portal at North Bank appeared
especially penetrable, on a Sunday afternoon of April '69. Later
occasions, after a considerable lapse, were not to overlay the absolute
face-value, as I may call it, of all the appearances then and there
presented me--which were taken home by a young spirit almost abjectly
grateful, at any rate all devoutly prepared, for them. I find it idle
even to wonder what "place" the author of Silas Marner and Middlemarch
may be conceived to have in the pride of our literature--so settled and
consecrated in the individual range of view is many such a case free at
last to find itself, free after ups and downs, after fluctuations of
fame or whatever, which have divested judgment of any relevance that
isn't most of all the relevance of a living and recorded _relation_. It
has ceased then to know itself in any degree as an estimate, has shaken
off the anxieties of circumspection and comparison and just grown happy
to act as an attachment pure and simple, an effect of life's own logic,
but in the ashes of which the wonted fires of youth need but to be blown
upon for betrayal of a glow. Reflective appreciation may have originally
been concerned, whether at its most or at its least, but it is well
over, to our infinite relief--yes, to our immortal comfort, I think; the
interval back cannot again be bridged. We simply sit with our enjoyed
gain, our residual rounded possession in our lap; a safe old treasure,
which has ceased to shrink, if indeed also perhaps greatly to swell, and
all that further touches it is the fine vibration set up if the name we
know it all by is called