Whereupon he reeled
out curious extracts from that allegory--`almost as good as
"Gulliver"'--with a memorable instance of the way in which the
traveller to the moon was shocked by the conversation of the natives,
and the natives' sense of propriety was outraged by the conversation
of the traveller.
In life, as in (that for him more truly actual thing) literature, it
was always the preterit that enthralled him. Of any passing events, of
anything the newspapers were full of, never a word from him; and I
should have been sorry if there had been. But I did, through the
medium of Watts-Dunton, sometimes start him on topics that might have
led him to talk of Rossetti and other old comrades. For me the names
of those men breathed the magic of the past, just as it was breathed
for me by Swinburne's presence. For him, I suppose, they were but a
bit of the present, and the mere fact that they had dropped out of it
was not enough to hallow them. He never mentioned them. But I was glad
to see that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own
as I in the days just before mine. He recounted to us things he had
been told in his boyhood by an aged aunt, or great-aunt--`one of the
Ashburnhams'; how, for example, she had been taken by her mother to a
county ball, a distance of many miles, and, on the way home through
the frosty and snowy night, the family-coach had suddenly stopped:
there was a crowd of dark figures in the way.
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