xth Avenue.
It was as "our" house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited my
approval of it--heaping as that does once more the measure of my small
adhesiveness. I thoroughly approved--quite as if I had foreseen that the
place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of
anchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for the
eyes, since it was there I first fondly gaped at the process of
"decorating." I saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed of
folded newspaper--where in the roaring city are those quaint badges of
the handicrafts now?--mounted on platforms and casting plaster into
moulds; I saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish grained
paper upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the grain and the
pattern (for there was a pattern from waist-high down, a complication of
dragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) a wonderful
and sumptuous thing. I would give much, I protest, to recover its lost
secret, to see what it really was--so interesting ever to retrace, and
sometimes so difficult of belief, in a community of one's own knowing,
is the general aesthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, the
all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that Taste has smilingly
survived and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenly
look one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled in those years with
the very worst of the danger-signals--though indeed they figured but as
coarse complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just been ushered in,
and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacant
spaces and eligible sites then numerous between the Fifth and Sixth
Avenues, more and more affronted the day. We seemed to have come up from
a world of quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square and
thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious.
There were even there spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as the
charmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed the
Fifth Avenue corner to our grandfather's, our New York grandfather's
house, itself built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so long
before, and at no distant time in truth to be solidly but much less
pleasingly neighboured. The ancient name of the Parade-ground still hung
about the central space, and the ancient wooden palings, then so
generally accounted proper for central spaces--the whole image
infinitel