Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/134

108 HENRY JAMES banks of this column and fairly flood the entire sur- rounding page. But the paragraph which follows may serve. Mr. James, when a schoolboy, returning to America from Europe, took a look at Paris from his pension bedroom window, and this is how he recollects that morning mood : — . . . The " old-world " hours were numbered too dreadfully — had shrunk but to a handful : I had waked up to that, as with a passionate even if private need for gathering in and saving, on the morrow of our reaching our final sticking-place : I had slipped from my so cushioned sleep, my canopied couch, to hang, from the balcony of our quatri^me, my brothers' and mine, over that Place du Palais Royal and up against that sculptured and storied facade of the new Louvre, which seemed to me then to represent, in its strength, the capacity and chiselled rim of some such potent vivifying cup as it might have been given us, under a happier arrangement, to taste now in its fullness and with a braver sense for it. Over against us on the great Palace wall, as I make out — if not for that occasion then for some other — were statues of heroes. Napoleon's young generals, Hoche, Marceau, Desaix, or whoever, such a galaxy as never was or should be again for splendid monumental reference ; and what it somehow came to was that here massed itself the shining Second Empire, over which they stood straight aloft and on guard, like archangels of the sword, and that the whole thing was a high-pitched wonder and splendour, which we had already, in our small, gaping way, got into a sort of relation with, and which would have ever so much more, ever so thrillingly, to give us. What it would give us loomed but vaguely enough out of the great hum and the great toned perspective, and with all the great noble expanse, of which we had constant reminder ; but that we were present at something it would be always after a privilege to have been concerned with, and that we were perversely and inconsiderately dropping out of it, and for a reason, so far as there might be a reason, that was scarcely less strange — all this loomed large to me as our interval shrank, and I even ask myself before the memory of it whether I was ever again in the later and more encompassing and accommo- dating years to have in those places so rich a weight of conscious- ness to carry or so grand a presumption of joy. The presumption so boldly entertained was, if you please, of what the whole thing meant. It meant, immensely, the glittering r^gime^ and that