nce I in fact then saw them flush at me over the cold grey sea
with an authenticity almost fierce. I didn't in the event, as has been
seen, go to Craven Street for rooms, but I did go, on the very first
occasion, for atmosphere, neither more nor less--the young man of the
ship, building so much better than he knew, had guaranteed me such a
rightness of that; and it belongs to this reminiscence, for the
triviality of which I should apologize did I find myself at my present
pitch capable of apologizing for anything, that I had on the very spot
there one of those hallucinations as to the precious effect dreadful to
lose and yet impossible to render which interfused the aesthetic dream in
presence of its subject with the mortal drop of despair (as I should
insist at least didn't the despair itself seem to have acted here as the
preservative). The precious effect in the case of Craven Street was that
it absolutely reeked, to my fond fancy, with associations born of the
particular ancient piety embodied in one's private altar to Dickens; and
that this upstart little truth alone would revel in explanations that I
should for the time have feverishly to forego. The exquisite matter was
not the identification with the scene of special shades or names; it was
just that the whole Dickens procession marched up and down, the whole
Dickens world looked out of its queer, quite sinister windows--for it
was the socially sinister Dickens, I am afraid, rather than the socially
encouraging or confoundingly comic who still at that moment was most apt
to meet me with his reasons. Such a reason was just that look of the
inscrutable riverward street, packed to blackness with accumulations of
suffered experience, these, indescribably, disavowed and confessed at
one and the same time, and with the fact of its blocked old Thames-side
termination, a mere fact of more oppressive enclosure now, telling all
sorts of vague loose stories about it.

V

Why, however, should I pick up so small a crumb from that mere brief
first course at a banquet of initiation which was in the event to
prolong itself through years and years?--unless indeed as a scrap of a
specimen, chosen at hazard, of the prompt activity of a process by which
my intelligence afterwards came to find itself more fed, I think, than
from any other source at all, or, for that matter, from all other
sources put together. A hundred more suchlike modest memories breathe
upon me, each wi