est, by any
perception of mine, as I suppose I should still blush to recall, had
taken place in America since the War. How _could_ anything, I really
wanted to ask--anything comparable, that is, to what was taking place
under my eyes in Half-Moon Street and at dear softly presiding Rutson's
table of talk. It doubtless essentially belonged to the exactly right
type and tone and general figure of my fellow-breakfasters from the
Temple, from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the House of Commons,
from goodness knew what other scarce discernible Olympian altitudes, it
belonged to the very cut of their hair and their waistcoats and their
whiskers--for it was still more or less a whiskered age--that they
should desire from me much distinctness about General Grant's first
cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the newspaper happened
then to beat; yet at the same time that I asked myself if it was to such
cold communities, such flat frustrations as were so proposed, that I
had sought to lift my head again in European air, I found the crisis
enriched by sundry other apprehensions.

They melted together in it to that increase of savour I have already
noted, yet leaving me vividly admonished that the blankness of my mind
as to the Washington candidates relegated me to some class unencountered
as yet by any one of my conversers, a class only not perfectly
ridiculous because perfectly insignificant. Also that politics walked
abroad in England, so that one might supremely bump against them, as
much as, by my fond impression, they took their exercise in America but
through the back streets and the ways otherwise untrodden and the very
darkness of night; that further all lively attestations were _ipso
facto_ interesting, and that finally and in the supreme degree, the
authenticity of whatever one was going to learn in the world would
probably always have for its sign that one got it at some personal cost.
To this generalisation mightn't one even add that in proportion as the
cost was great, or became fairly excruciating, the lesson, the value
acquired would probably be a thing to treasure? I remember really going
so far as to wonder if any act of acquisition of the life-loving,
life-searching sort that most appealed to me wouldn't mostly be
fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal
discomfort, in some self-exposure and some none too impossible
consequent discomfiture, for the sake of it. Didn't