e scene, profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, confusedly
though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its
heritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense young
fancy (when a young fancy _is_ intense) capriciously, absurdly
drinks?--so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a
love-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme
symbol of the fair or the strange. The Galerie d'Apollon became for
years what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite
irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour,
with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and
exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn
many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and
capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life.
The climax of this extraordinary experience--which stands alone for me
as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of
cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as
in unutterable fear--was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along
a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in
terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from
irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before
been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my
shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The
lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the
great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more
appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was,
whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep
within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my
impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound,
forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of
the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the
tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression
and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the
long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the
far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line
of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for _his_ life, while a
great storm of thunder