ause
it is intended, in a way, to influence other people, and to make them
think that celebrated people live habitually on a higher tone of
intellect and emotion than they do actually live upon. My on experience
of meeting great people is that they are, as a rule, disappointingly
like ordinary people, both in their tastes and in their conversation.
Very few men or women, who are extremely effective in practical or
artistic lines, have the energy or the vitality to expend themselves
very freely in talk or social intercourse. They do not save themselves
up for their speeches or their books; but they give their best energies
to them, and have little current coin of high thought left for ordinary
life. The mischief is that these interviews are generally conducted by
inquisitive and rhetorical strangers, not distinguished for social tact
or overburdened with good taste; and so the whole occasion tends to
wear a melodramatic air, which is fatal both to artistic effect as well
as to simple propriety.

October 9, 1888.

Let me set against my fashionable luncheon-party of a few weeks ago a
visit which I owe no less to my success, and which has been a true and
deep delight to me. I had a note yesterday from a man whom I hold in
great and deep reverence, a man who I have met two or three times, a
poet indeed, one of our true and authentic singers. He writes that he
is in the neighbourhood; may he come over for a few hours and renew our
acquaintance?

He came, in the morning. One has only to set eyes upon him to know that
one is in the presence of a hero, to feel that his poetry just streams
from him like light from the sun; that it is not the central warmth,
but the flying rippling radiance of the outward-bound light, falling in
momentary beauty on the common things about his path. He is a great big
man, carelessly dressed, like a Homeric king. I liked everything about
him from head to foot, his big carelessly-worn clothes, the bright tie
thrust loosely through a cameo ring; his loose shaggy locks, his strong
beard. His face, with its delicate pallor, and purely moulded features,
had a youthful air of purity and health; yet there was a dim trouble of
thought on his brow, over the great, smiling, flashing grey eyes. He
came in with a sort of royal greeting, he flung his big limbs on a
sofa; he talked easily, quietly, lavishly, saying fine things with no
effort, dropping a subject quickly if he thought it did not interest
me