sed-in
and, as who should say, cosy that the ancient order and contracted
state and thick-coloured dimness, all unconscious of rearrangements and
reversals, blighting new lights and invidious shattering comparisons,
still prevailed and kept contemplation comfortably confused and serenely
superstitious, when not indeed at its sharpest moments quite fevered
with incoherences. The place looks to me across the half century richly
dim, yet at the same time both perversely plain and heavily
violent--violent through indifference to the separations and selections
that have become a tribute to modern nerves; but I cherish exactly those
facts of benightedness, seeming as they do to have positively and
blessedly conditioned the particular sweetness of wonder with which I
haunted the Family of Darius, the Bacchus and Ariadne, or the so-called
portrait of Ariosto. Could one in those days feel anything with force,
whether for pleasure or for pain, without feeling it as an immense
little act or event of life, and as therefore taking place on a scene
and in circumstances scarce at all to be separated from its own sense
and impact?--so that to recover it is to recover the whole medium, the
material pressure of things, and find it most marked for preservation as
an aspect, even, distinguishably, a "composition."

_What_ a composition, for instance again I am capable at this hour of
exclaiming, the conditions of felicity in which I became aware, one
afternoon during a renewed gape before the Bacchus and Ariadne, first
that a little gentleman beside me and talking with the greatest vivacity
to another gentleman was extremely remarkable, second that he had the
largest and most _chevelu_ auburn head I had ever seen perched on a
scarce perceptible body, third that I held some scrap of a clue to his
identity, which couldn't fail to be eminent, fourth that this tag of
association was with nothing less than a small photograph sent me
westward across the sea a few months before, and fifth that the sitter
for the photograph had been the author of Atalanta in Calydon and Poems
and Ballads! I thrilled, it perfectly comes back to me, with the prodigy
of this circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same
breath with Mr. Swinburne--that is in the same breath in which _he_
admired Titian and in which I also admired _him_, the whole constituting
on the spot between us, for appreciation, that is for mine, a fact of
intercourse, such a fact as