myself
holding off, I simply stop: not holding off, that is, but holding on,
and from the very fear to do so; which sounds, I recognise, like
perusal, like renewal, of the scantest. I don't renew, I wouldn't renew
for the world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in the
dusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. Happy the house of
life in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draught of the
intellect whistling through the passages. We were practically
contemporary, contemporary with the issues, the fluttering monthly
numbers--that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, constituted
for us in itself romance, on which nothing, to the end, succeeds in
laying its hands.

The whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, though
there are others still: that of my having been sent to bed one evening,
in Fourteenth Street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in the
library and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from Albany, the
youngest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's most
extravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new,
which must have been the first, instalment of David Copperfield. I had
feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, the
friendly shade of some screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behind
which and glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened. I listened
long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord
at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into the
sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. I was this time
effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable. I
remember indeed just afterwards finding the sequel, in especial the vast
extrusion of the Micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; which took a few
years to grow adequate--years in which the general contagious
consciousness, and our own household response not least, breathed
heavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and Little Dorrit; the seeds of
acquaintance with Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son, these coming thickly
on, I had found already sown. I was to feel that I had been born, born
to a rich awareness, under the very meridian; there sprouted in those
years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of
Copperfield. Yet if I was to wait to achieve the happier of these
recognitions I had already pored over Oliver Twist--albeit now uncertain
of t