war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade,
but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent
with them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words.

I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying
too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked.
But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain
where I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be
ended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about
the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper
which never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny
heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its
clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it
had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough
simply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed
my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day
passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless
first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great
sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed
for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of
literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat's publisher in
the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and
that made a whole world's difference.




XII.

The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,