omantically
speaking, to clutch and keep the clue and the logic of; thanks to it
the whole picture, every element, objects and figures, background and
actors, nature and art, hung consummately together, appealing in their
own light and under their own law--interesting ever in every case by
instituting comparisons, sticking on the contrary to their true instinct
and suggesting only contrast. They were the _opposite_, the assured, the
absolute, the unashamed, in respect to whatever might be of a generally
similar intention elsewhere: this was their dignity, their beauty and
their strength--to look back on which is to wonder if one didn't quite
consciously tremble, before the exhibition, for any menaced or mitigated
symptom in it. I honestly think one did, even in the first flushes of
recognition, more or less so tremble; I remember at least that in spite
of such disconcertments, such dismays, as certain of the most thoroughly
Victorian _choses vues_ originally treated me to, something yet deeper
and finer than observation admonished me to like them just as they were,
or at least not too fatuously to dislike--since it somehow glimmered
upon me that if they had lacked their oddity, their monstrosity, as it
even might be, their unabashed insular conformity, other things that
belong to them, as they belong to these, might have loomed less large
and massed less thick, which effect was wholly to be deprecated. To
catch that secret, I make out the more I think of it, was to have
perhaps the smokiest, but none the less the steadiest, light to walk by;
the "clue," as I have called it, was to be one's appreciation of an
England that should turn its back directly enough, and without fear of
doing it too much, on examples and ideas not strictly homebred--since
she did her own sort of thing with such authority and was even then to
be noted as sometimes trying other people's with a _kind_ of disaster
not recorded, at the worst, among themselves.

I must of course disavow pretending to have read this vivid philosophy
into my most immediate impressions, and I may in fact perhaps not claim
to have been really aware of its seed till a considerable time had
passed, till apprehensions and reflections had taken place in quantity,
immeasurable quantity, so to speak, and a great stir-up of the
imagination been incurred. Undoubtedly is it in part the new--that is,
more strictly, the elder--acuteness that I touch all the prime profit
with; I didn