noted that no little
game on her part could well less have resembled or simulated an
accident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescued
from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had
plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes,
than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count
the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a
story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually
condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic
adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was
to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not
restless.

The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I insist on prolonging a
little further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliest
aesthetic seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands by which they
were sown, but practically appointed none the less to cause that
peculiarly flurried hare to run--flurried because over ground so little
native to it--when so many others held back. Is it _that_ air of romance
that gilds for me then the Barnum background--taking it as a symbol;
that makes me resist, to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty,
any impulse to translate into harsh terms any old sordidities and
poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects
at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then
flourishing?--why, they must have been for the most part of the last
meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant
face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor
vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in
effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous
and abnormal living--from the total impression of which things we
plucked somehow the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justice
proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at Niblo's, which represented
in our scheme the ideal evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day; so
that I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the rich
cover of night (which was the supreme charm,) how it comes that this
larger memory hasn't swallowed up all others. For here, absolutely,
_was_ the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else--grown in the
great garden of the Ravel Family and offered again and again to our deep
i