the inscrutable, and Delacroix in especial with the
incalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happy
transition, begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style,
though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed
was one of its forms--while we saw all the others, without exception,
exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and
bewildered me.

It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; I
shall never forget how--speaking, that is, for my own sense--they
filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated
sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could
directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and
coloured and confounding air, was difficult--it discouraged and defied;
which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was
that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting
us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their
endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual
revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of
squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off
the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought
effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every
point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of
experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself
most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous
Galerie d'Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and
seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining
parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by
little, that is again and again, a general sense of _glory_. The glory
meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme
design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the
richest and noblest expression. The world there was at the same time, by
an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my small
imagination, of the Second Empire, which was (for my notified
consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so
amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its
protection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of the
whol