fantastication that I set down a state of mind so out of proportion to
anything it could point to round about save by the vaguest of
foolish-looking gestures; and it would perhaps in truth be hard to say
whether in the mixture of spirit and sense so determined the fact of
innocence or that of intelligence most prevailed. I like to recover this
really prodigious flush--as my reader, clearly, must perceive I do; I
like fairly to hang about a particular small hour of that momentous
March day--which I have glanced at too, I believe, on some other and
less separated page than this--for the sake of the extraordinary gage of
experience that it seemed on the spot to offer, and that I had but to
take straight up: my life, on so complacently near a view as I now treat
myself to, having veritably consisted but in the prolongation of that
act. I took up the gage, and as I look back the fullest as well as
simplest account of the interval till now strikes me as being that I
have never, in common honour, let it drop again. And the small hour was
just that of my having landed at Liverpool in the gusty, cloudy,
overwhelmingly English morning and pursued, with immediate intensities
of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment for fear of
almost indecently overnaming it, a course which had seated me at a late
breakfast in the coffee-room of the old Adelphi Hotel ("Radley's," as I
had to deplore its lately having ceased to be dubbed,) and handed me
over without a scruple to my fate. This doom of inordinate exposure to
appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great
beheld sum of things, I regard in other words as having settled upon me
once for all while I observed for instance that in England the plate of
buttered muffin and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after
hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that
circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments. I must have had with
my tea and my muffin a boiled egg or two and a dab of marmalade, but it
was from a far other store of condiments I most liberally helped myself.
I was lucidly aware of so gorging--esoterically, as it were, while I
drew out the gustatory process; and I must have said in that lost
reference to this scene of my dedication which I mentioned above that I
was again and again in the aftertime to win back the homeliest notes of
the impression, the damp and darksome light washed in from the steep,
bl