I even on occasion
mount to the very height of seeing it written that these bad moments
were the downright consecration of knowledge, that is of perception and,
essentially, of exploration, always dangerous and treacherous, and so
might afterwards come to figure to memory, each in its order, as the
silver nail on the wall of the temple where the trophy is hung up? All
of which remark, I freely grant, is a great ado about the long since so
bedimmed little Half-Moon Street breakfasts, and is moreover quite wide
of the mark if suggesting that the joys of recognition, those of
imaginatively, of projectively fitting in and fitting out every piece in
the puzzle and every recruit to the force of a further understanding
weren't in themselves a most bustling and cheering business.

It was bustling at least, assuredly, if not quite always in the same
degree exhilarating, to breakfast out at all, as distinguished from
lunching, without its being what the Harvard scene made of it, one of
the incidents of "boarding"; it was association at a jump with the
ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers
and _tutti quanti_--as well as the exciting note of a social order in
which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon
an office or a store. The mere vision in numbers of persons embodying
and in various ways sharply illustrating a clear alternative to that
passivity told a tale that would be more and more worth the reading with
every turn of the page. So at all events I fantasticated while harassed
by my necessity to weave into my general tapestry every thread that
would conduce to a pattern, and so the thread for instance of the great
little difference of my literally never having but once "at home" been
invited to breakfast on types as well as on toast and its accessories
could suggest an effect of silk or silver when absolutely dangled before
me. That single occasion at home came back in a light that fairly
brought tears to my eyes, for it was touching now to the last wanness
that the lady of the winter morn of the Massachusetts Sabbath, one of
those, as I recover it, of 1868, to reach whose board we had waded
through snowdrifts, had been herself fondling a reminiscence, though I
can scarce imagine supposing herself to offer for our consumption any
other type than her own. It was for that matter but the sweet staleness
of her reminiscence that made her a type, and I remember how it h