o say; it probably came,
however, I seem actually to make out, very much to this particular
perception, exactly, that any penetration of the London scene would _be_
experience after a fashion that an exercise of one's "mere intellectual
curiosity" wherever else wouldn't begin to represent, glittering as the
rewards to such curiosity amid alien peoples of genius might thoroughly
appear. On the other hand it was of course going to be nothing less than
a superlative help that one would have but to reach out straight and in
the full measure of one's passion for these rewards, to find one's self
carried all the way by one's active, one's contemplative concern with
them--this delightful affair, fraught with increase of light, of joy and
wonder, of possibilities of adventure for the mind, in fine, inevitably
exhausting the relation.

II

Let me not here withal appear to pretend to say how far I then foresaw
myself likely to proceed, as it were, with the inimitable France and the
incomparable Italy; my real point is altogether in the simple fact that
they hovered before me, even in their scrappy foretastes, to a great
effect of ease and inspiration, whereas I shouldn't at all have resented
the charge of fairly hiding behind the lowly door of Mr. Lazarus Fox--so
unmistakeably did it open into complications tremendous. This excellent
man, my Half-Moon Street landlord--I surrender, I can't keep away from
him--figures to me now as but one of the thousand forms of pressure in
the collective assault, but he couldn't have been more carefully chosen
for his office had he consciously undertaken to express to me in a
concentrated manner most of the things I was "after." The case was
rather indeed perhaps that he himself by his own mere perfection put me
up to much of what I should most confidently look for, and that the
right lines of observation and enjoyment, of local and social contact,
as I may call it, were most of all those that started out from him and
came back to him. It was as if nothing I saw could have done without
him, as if nothing he was could have done without everything else. The
very quarters I occupied under his protection happened, for that matter,
to swarm--as I estimated swarming--with intensities of suggestion--aware
as I now encourage myself to become that the first note of the
numberless reverberations I was to pick up in the aftertime had
definitely been struck for me as under the wave of his conducting