rom the waves (I see even now, with every detail, this
inanimate victim supine on the strand) met his death by some cruel
bullet of which I have forgotten the determinant cause, only remembering
the final agony as something we could scarce bear and a strain of our
sensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom of
exposing us.

These performers and these things were in all probability but of a
middling skill and splendour--it was the pre-trapeze age, and we were
caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something
sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own
humanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to
be renewed; but I light this taper to the initiators, so to call them,
whom I remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given us
a silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweet
names never thought of from then till now. Signor Leon Javelli, in whom
the French and the Italian charm appear to have met, who was he, and
what did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do I thus recall and
admire him? I am afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most domestic
of our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch of
the rope, into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, where
they leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to face
with us; but I dare say he bounded, brave Signor Leon, to the greatest
height of all: let this vague agility, in any case, connect him with
that revelation of the ballet, the sentimental-pastoral, of other years,
which, in The Four Lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson as in words
of one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll, would have affected us
as classic, I am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term of
appreciation. When we read in English story-books about the pantomimes
in London, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were the
only things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were masters
of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London
constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true,
though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking
liberties with policemen--these last evidently a sharp note in a
picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying
nothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and
columbine