reference.

All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim
first move toward "The Portrait," which was exactly my grasp of a
single character--an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a
fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to
me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long
time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its
charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in
motion and, so to speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that
I saw it as bent upon its fate--some fate or other; which, among
the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my
vivid individual--vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at
large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle,
to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an
identity. If the apparition was still all to be placed how came
it to be vivid?--since we puzzle such quantities out, mostly,
just by the business of placing them. One could answer such a
question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if
not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth
of one's imagination. One would describe then what, at a given
time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for
instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to
clearness, how, under favour of occasion, it had been able to
take over (take over straight from life) such and such a
constituted, animated figure or form. The figure has to that
extent, as you see, BEEN placed--placed in the imagination that
detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its
presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the
mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends,