ny it was a
common custom for students, when calling on a friend, to bring and leave
generally a small bouquet. When I did this in Berlin my friends were
astonished at it. This was an old Italian custom, as we may read in the
beautiful One Hundred and Fifty _Brindisi_ or Toasts of Minto.

"Porto a voi un fior novello,
Ed, oh come vago e bello!"

In 1847 even a very respectable hotel in Holland was in any city quite
like one of two centuries before. You entered a long antiquely-brown
room, traversed full length by a table. Before every chair was placed a
little metallic dish with hot coals, and a churchwarden pipe was brought
to every visitor at once without awaiting orders. The stolid, literal,
mechanical action of all the people's minds was then _wonderful_. An
average German peasant was a genius compared to these fresh, rosy-fair,
well-clad Hollanders. It was to me a new phase of human happiness in
imbecility, or rather in undisturbed routine; for it is written that no
bird can fly like a bullet and doze or sleep sweetly at the same time.
Yet, as from the Huns, the most hideous wretches in the world, there
arose by intermixture the Hungarians, who are perhaps the handsomest, so
from the Knickerbocker Dutch sprang the wide-awake New Yorkers! The
galleries in Holland and Belgium were to me joys unutterable and as the
glory of life itself. Munich and Thiersch still inspired me; I seemed to
have found a destiny in aesthetics or art, or what had been wanting in
Princeton; that is, how the beautiful entered into life and was developed
in history and made itself felt in all that was worth anything at all.
Modern English writers on this subject--with exceptions like that of J.
A. Symonds, whose Essays I cannot commend too highly--are in the same
relation to its grand truth and higher inspiration as Emerson and Carlyle
to Pantheism in its mightiest early forms. For several years the actual
mastery of aesthetics gave me great comfort, and advanced me marvellously
in thought to wider and far higher regions.

I forget where I parted with Pottinger; all that I can remember was, that
early in November I arrived alone in Paris, going to some small hotel or
other, and that as all the fatigues of the past many weeks of weary
travel seemed to come upon me all at once, I went to bed, and never left
the house till four o'clock P.M. the next day. On the next I found my
way into the Latin Quarter, and secured a _not_ ver