tion of
quintessences--which sprang at me of themselves, for that matter, out of
any appearance that confessed to the least value in the compound, the
least office in the harmony. If the commonest street-vista was a fairly
heart-shaking contributive image, if the incidents of the thick
renascent light anywhere, and the perpetual excitement of never knowing,
between it and the historic and determined gloom, which was which and
which one would most "back" for the general outcome and picture, so the
great sought-out compositions, the Hampton Courts and the Windsors, the
Richmonds, the Dulwiches, even the very Hampstead Heaths and Putney
Commons, to say nothing of the Towers, the Temples, the Cathedrals and
the strange penetrabilities of the City, ranged themselves like the rows
of great figures in a sum, an amount immeasurably huge, that one would
draw on if not quite as long as one lived, yet as soon as ever one
should seriously get to work. That, to a tune of the most beautiful
melancholy--at least as I catch it again now--was the way all values
came out: they were charged somehow with a useability the most
immediate, the most urgent, and which, I seemed to see, would keep me
restless till I should have done something of my very own with them.

This was indeed perhaps what most painted them over with the admonitory
appeal: there were truly moments at which they seemed not to answer for
it that I should get all the good of them, and the finest--what I was
so extravagantly, so fantastically after--unless I could somehow at once
indite my sonnet and prove my title. The difficulty was all in there
being so much of them--I might myself have been less restless if they
could only have been less vivid. This they absolutely declined at any
moment and in any connection to be, and it was ever so long till they
abated a jot of the refusal. Thereby, in consequence, as may easily be
judged, they were to keep me in alarms to which my measures practically
taken, my catastrophes anxiously averted, remained not quite
proportionate. I recall a most interesting young man who had been my
shipmate on the homeward-bound "China," shortly before--I could go at
length into my reasons for having been so struck with him, but I
forbear--who, on our talking, to my intense trepidation of curiosity, of
where I might advisedly "go" in London, let me know that he always went
to Craven Street Strand, where bachelor lodgings were highly convenient,
and whe