Dip with me, for an example, into some other autobiography... Here: ‘Shortly after I came to London’--it is odd that autobiographists never are born or bred there--‘one of the houses I found open to me was that of Mrs. T--, a woman whom (so it seemed to me when in later years I studied Italian) the word simpatica described exactly, and who, as the phrase is, “knew everybody.” Calling on her one Sunday afternoon, I noticed among the guests, as I came in, a short, stalwart man with a grey beard. “I particularly,” my hostess whispered to me, “want you to know Mr. Robert Browning.” Everything in the room seemed to swim round me, and I had the sensation of literally sinking through the carpet when presently I found my hand held for a moment--it was only a moment, but it seemed to me an eternity--by the hand that had written “Paracelsus.” I had a confused impression of something godlike about the man. His brow was magnificent. But the eyes were what stood out. Not that they were prominent eyes, but they seemed to look you through and through, and had a lustre--there is no other word for it--which,’ I maintain, would have been far less dazzling out in the street, just as the world-sadness of Carlyle’s eyes would have been twice as harrowing in Mrs. T--‘s drawing-room. But even there neither of those pairs of eyes could have made its fullest effect. The most terrifically gratifying way of seeing one’s hero and his eyes for the first time is to see them in his own home. Anywhere else, believe me, something of his essence is forfeit. ‘The rose of roses’ loses more or less of its beauty in any vase, and rather more than less there in a nosegay of ordinary little blossoms (to which I rather rudely liken Mrs. T--‘s other friends). The supreme flower should be first seen growing from its own Sharonian soil.