In 1847 even a very respectable hotel in Holland was in any city quite like one of two centuries before. You entered a long antiquely-brown room, traversed full length by a table. Before every chair was placed a little metallic dish with hot coals, and a churchwarden pipe was brought to every visitor at once without awaiting orders. The stolid, literal, mechanical action of all the people's minds was then _wonderful_. An average German peasant was a genius compared to these fresh, rosy-fair, well-clad Hollanders. It was to me a new phase of human happiness in imbecility, or rather in undisturbed routine; for it is written that no bird can fly like a bullet and doze or sleep sweetly at the same time. Yet, as from the Huns, the most hideous wretches in the world, there arose by intermixture the Hungarians, who are perhaps the handsomest, so from the Knickerbocker Dutch sprang the wide-awake New Yorkers! The galleries in Holland and Belgium were to me joys unutterable and as the glory of life itself. Munich and Thiersch still inspired me; I seemed to have found a destiny in aesthetics or art, or what had been wanting in Princeton; that is, how the beautiful entered into life and was developed in history and made itself felt in all that was worth anything at all. Modern English writers on this subject--with exceptions like that of J. A. Symonds, whose Essays I cannot commend too highly--are in the same relation to its grand truth and higher inspiration as Emerson and Carlyle to Pantheism in its mightiest early forms. For several years the actual mastery of aesthetics gave me great comfort, and advanced me marvellously in thought to wider and far higher regions. I forget where I parted with Pottinger; all that I can remember was, that early in November I arrived alone in Paris, going to some small hotel or other, and that as all the fatigues of the past many weeks of weary travel seemed to come upon me all at once, I went to bed, and never left the house till four o'clock P.M. the next day. On the next I found my way into the Latin Quarter, and secured a _not_ very superior room in the Place Saint-Michel, near the Ecole de Medecine, to which I moved my luggage. I was very much astonished, while sitting alone and rather blue and overcast in my room, at the sudden entrance of a second cousin of mine named Frank Fisher, who was studying medicine in Paris. He had by some odd chance seen my name registered in the newspapers as having arrived at the hotel, and lost no time in looking me up. He lived on the other side of the Seine in the Boule Rouge, near the Rue Helder, a famous happy hunting-ground for _les biches_--I mean kids or the very dear. I must go forthwith to his quarters and dine, which I did, and so my introduction to Paris was fairly begun.