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.
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