the life of letters and of (oh the great thing!) impressions "gone in for." To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one's impressions, to feel them related and all harmoniously coloured, that _was_ positively to face the aesthetic, the creative, even, quite wondrously, the critical life and almost on the spot to commence author. They had begun, the impressions--that was what was the matter with them--to scratch quite audibly at the door of liberation, of extension, of projection; what they were _of_ one more or less knew, but what they were _for_ was the question that began to stir, though one was still to be a long time at a loss directly to answer it. There, for the present, was the rub, the dark difficulty at which one could but secretly stare--secretly because one was somehow ashamed of its being there and would have quickly removed one's eyes, or tried to clear them, if caught in the act of watching. Impressions were not merely all right but were the dearest things in the world; only one would have gone to the stake rather than in the first place confessed to some of them, or in the second announced that one really lived by them and built on them. This failure then to take one's stand in the connection could but come from the troubled view that they were naught without a backing, a stout stiff hard-grained underside that would hold them together and of which the terrible name was simply science, otherwise learning, and learning exclusively by books, which were at once the most beautiful and the most dreadful things in the world, some of them right, strikingly, showily right, some of them disgracefully and almost unmentionably wrong, that is grossly irrelevant, as for instance a bound volume of Once a Week would be, but remarkable above all for overwhelming number and in general for defiance of comprehension. It was true that one had from time to time the rare adventure of one's surprise at understanding parts of them none the less--understanding more than a very little, more than much too little; but there was no practical support to speak of in that, even the most one could ever hope to understand being a mere drop in the bucket. Never did I quite strike it off, I think, that impressions might themselves _be_ science--and this probably because I didn't then know them, when it came to the point, as anything but life. I knew them but by that collective and unpractical--many persons would have said that frivolous--name; which saw me little further. I was under the impression--this in fact the very liveliest of what might have been called the lot--that life and knowledge were simply mutual opposites, one inconsistent with the other; though hovered about, together, at the same time, by the anomaly that when knowledge impinged upon life, pushed against her, as it were, and drove her to the wall, it was all right, and such was knowledge's way and title; whereas when life played the like tricks with knowledge