If we compare his impression, with slight extravagance, to some of the greatest he had ever received, this is simply because the image before him was so rounded and stamped.

It expressed with pure perfection, it exhausted its character.

It was so absolutely and so unconsciously what it was.

He had been floated by the strangest of chances out of the rushing stream into a clear still backwater--a deep and quiet pool in which objects were sharply mirrored.

He had hitherto in life known nothing that was old except a few statues and pictures; but here everything was old, was immemorial, and nothing so much so as the very freshness itself.