that just those days began a business for me that was to go
ever so much further than I then dreamed and planted a seed that was, by
my own measure, singularly to sprout and flourish--the harvest of which,
I almost permit myself to believe, has even yet not all been gathered. I
foresee moreover how little I shall be able to resist, throughout these
Notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual _vivid_ image
of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms
of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in
relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the
wonder of their saved intensity. They have saved it, they seem to say to
us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone
makes a value and a light and a dignity for them, something indeed of an
argument that our story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses and
gaps without them. Not to be denied also, over and above this, is the
downright pleasure of the illusion yet again created, the _apparent_
transfer from the past to the present of the particular combination of
things that did at its hour ever so directly operate and that isn't
after all then drained of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensation,
for participation in the act of life, in the attesting sights, sounds,
smells, the illusion, as I say, of the recording senses.

What began, during the springtime of my actual reference, in a couple of
dusky ground-floor rooms at number 7 Half-Moon Street, was simply an
establishment all in a few days of a personal relation with London that
was not of course measurable at the moment--I saw in my bedazzled state
of comparative freedom too many other relations ahead, a fairly
intoxicated vision of choice and range--but that none the less set going
a more intimately inner consciousness, a wheel within the wheels, and
led to my departing, the actual, the general incident closed, in
possession of a return-ticket "good," as we say, for a longer interval
than I could then dream about, and that the first really earnest fumble
of after years brought surprisingly to light. I think it must have been
the very proportions themselves of the invitation and the interest that
kept down, under the immense impression, everything in the nature of
calculation and presumption; dark, huge and prodigious the other party
to our relation, London's and mine, as I called it, loomed and
spread--much t