eheld, or beheld
at least to such advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enormous
value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth that
sank in as I lay--the truth of one's embracing there, in all the
presented character of the scene, an amount of character I had felt no
scene present, not even the one I had raked from the Hotel Westminster;
the sort of thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, would sit
most warmly in the mind. Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was
"Europe," sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me--as if by a
mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now,
only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that
time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn't
have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified
and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an
uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary
measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression
was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things
than I then knew.

XXI

How shall I render certain other impressions coming back to me from that
summer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, on
the alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on various
couches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation? I considered
it best, I think, gathering in the fruits of a quickened sensibility to
it, in certain umbrageous apartments in which my parents had settled
themselves near Geneva; an old house, in ample grounds and among great
spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heats
and airs, known, if I am not mistaken, as the Campagne Gerebsoff--which
its mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had partly placed at our
disposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden, on a
chaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil, and I, in the
course of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her from
afar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity,
history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother Wilky,
who, according to his nature, or I may say to his genius, had made
without loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her and
quickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. Wilky's age
followed closely on mine