upying a house in Eaton Place, as
appeared then his wont, for the earlier weeks of the spring, and I seem
to recover that I had "gone on" to it, after dining somewhere else,
under protection of my supremely kind old friend the late Lord Houghton,
to whom I was indebted in those years for a most promiscuous
befriending. He must have been of the party, and Mrs. Greville quite
independently must, since I catch again the vision of her, so
expansively and voluminously seated that she might fairly have been
couchant, so to say, for the proposed characteristic act--there was a
deliberation about it that precluded the idea of a spring; that, namely,
of addressing something of the Laureate's very own to the Laureate's
very face. Beyond the sense that he took these things with a gruff
philosophy--and could always repay them, on the spot, in
heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it _was_ a question of
his genius--I gather in again no determined impression, unless it may
have been, as could only be probable, the effect of fond prefigurements
utterly blighted.

The fond prefigurements of youthful piety are predestined more often
than not, I think, experience interfering, to strange and violent
shocks; from which no general appeal is conceivable save by the prompt
preclusion either of faith or of knowledge, a sad choice at the best. No
other such illustration recurs to me of the possible refusal of those
two conditions of an acquaintance to recognise each other at a given
hour as the silent crash of which I was to be conscious several years
later, in Paris, when placed in presence of M. Ernest Renan, from the
surpassing distinction of whose literary face, with its exquisite finish
of every feature, I had from far back extracted every sort of shining
gage, a presumption general and positive. Widely enough to sink all
interest--that was the dreadful thing--opened there the chasm between
the implied, as I had taken it, and the attested, as I had, at the first
blush, to take it; so that one was in fact scarce to know what might
have happened if interest hadn't by good fortune already reached such a
compass as to stick half way down the descent. What interest _can_
survive becomes thus, surely, as much one of the lessons of life as the
number of ways in which it remains impossible. What comes up in face of
the shocks, as I have called them, is the question of a shift of every
supposition, a change of base under fire, as it were;