ups of coffee and two eggs and five minutes late!
Probably he would split the difference, bolt one cup of coffee and one
egg, and arrive two and a half minutes late. Henry watched him with
compassion; and when he had gone his ways, himself rose languidly and
dressed indolently, as with the aid of an invisible valet. At length he
sauntered down to breakfast, and sent out for a morning paper, which he
on no account ever read. He could imagine no more insulting waste of
time. He looked it through, but found no reference to the real
significance of the day.

Breakfast over, he wondered what he should do with himself, how he
should spend the day. His clear duty was to begin being a great man on
the spot, and work at being a great man every day punctually from nine
till six. But where should he begin? Should he sit down in a
business-like way and begin his long romantic poem, or should he write
an essay, or again should he make a start on his novel?

Romantic poems, he felt, however, are only well begun on special days
not easy to define; essays are only written on days when we have
determined to be idle,--and this, after the opening flirtation with
indolence, must be a busy day,--and it is not every day that one can
begin a novel. He might arrange his books, but really they were very
well arranged already. Or suppose he went out for a walk. Walking
quickened the brain. He might go and look in at the Art Gallery, where
he hadn't been for a long while, and see the new picture the morning
paper was talking about. It was by a painter whose poems he already knew
and loved. That might inspire him. So, by an accident of idleness, he
presently found himself standing rapt before the most wonderful picture
he had ever seen,--a picture to see which, he said to himself, men would
make pilgrimages to Tyre, when Tyre was a moss-grown, ruinous seaport,
from which the traffic of the world had long since passed away.

Henry at this time had visited none of the great galleries and, except
in a few reproductions, knew nothing of the great Italian masters.
Therefore to him this picture was Italy, the Renaissance, and
Catholicism, all concentrated into one enthralling canvas. But it was
something greater than that. It was the terrible meeting of Youth and
Love and Death in one tremendous moment of infinite loss. Infinite
passion and infinite loss were here pictured, in a medium which
combined all that was spiritual and all that was sensual in