and lightning played through the deep embrasures
of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat
revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young
imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within
me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in
the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those
of the Galerie d'Apollon of my childhood? The "scene of something" I had
vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of that
immense hallucination.

Of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of the
Louvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the moment
they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?--literally on
almost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, I
more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, in
a degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to know
could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. The sharp
and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me,
for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all,
my brother's and mine, under conduct of the good Jean Nadali,
before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de la
Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris (July 1855) and while
they were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled but uplifted, on
brave Nadali's arm--his professional acquaintance with the splendours
about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "European"
character: I cling to him while I gape at Gericault's Radeau de la
Meduse, _the_ sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of that
juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two or
three other more or less contemporary products, Guerin's Burial of
Atala, Prudhon's Cupid and Psyche, David's helmetted Romanisms, Madame
Vigee-Lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, with
how can I say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the
hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that
one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer
so-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way--though that
description didn't then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. It
came of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences,