ack, bricky street, the crackle of the strong draught of the British
"sea-coal" fire, much more confident of its function, I thought, than
the fires I had left, the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded
and refolded "Times," the incomparable truth to type of the waiter,
truth to history, to literature, to poetry, to Dickens, to Thackeray,
positively to Smollett, and to Hogarth, to every connection that could
help me to appropriate him and his setting, an arrangement of things
hanging together with a romantic rightness that had the force of a
revelation.

To what end appropriation became thus eager and romance thus easy one
could have asked one's self only if the idea of connectibility as
stretching away and away hadn't of a sudden taken on such a wealth of
suggestion; it represented at once a chain stretching off to heaven knew
where, but far into one's future at least, one's possibilities of life,
and every link and pulse of which it was going accordingly to be
indispensable, besides being delightful and wonderful, to recognise.
Recognition, I dare say, was what remained, through the adventure of the
months to come, the liveliest principle at work; both as bearing on the
already known, on things unforgotten and of a sense intensely cultivated
and cherished from my younger time, and on the imagined, the unimagined
and the unimaginable, a quantity that divided itself somehow into the
double muster of its elements, an endless vista or waiting array, down
the middle of which I should inconceivably pass--inconceivably save for
being sure of some thrilled arrest, some exchange of assurance and
response, at every step. Obviously half the charm, as I can but thinly
describe it, of the substantially continuous experience the first
passages of which I thus note was in the fact that, immensely moved by
it as I was, and having so to deal with it--in the anticipatory way or
to the whatevers and wherevers and whenevers within me that should find
it in order--I yet felt it in no degree as strange or obscure, baffling
or unrecognising on its own side; everything was so far from
impenetrable that my most general notion was the very ecstasy of
understanding and that really wherever I looked, and still more wherever
I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose. This in particular was of the
perfect felicity, that while the fact of difference all round me was
immense the embarrassment of it was nil--as if the getting into relation
with