pen to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack of
the passion, and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy
bears, as I think, on what one sees one's companions able to do--as
against one's own falling short--envy, as I knew it at least, was simply
of what they _were_, or in other words of a certain sort of richer
consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them.
They were so _other_--that was what I felt; and to _be_ other, other
almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright
compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable,
impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and just
that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks
relief quite out of the question. A platitude of acceptance of the poor
actual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it,
combined with a complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives,
though a view of them as only through the confectioner's hard
glass--that is what I recover as the nearest approach to an apology, in
the soil of my nature, for the springing seed of emulation. I never
dreamed of competing--a business having in it at the best, for my
temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity.
If competing was bad snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousy
was a sort of spiritual snatching. With which, nevertheless, all the
while, one might have been "like" So-and-So, who had such horizons. A
helpless little love of horizons I certainly cherished, and could
sometimes even care for my own. These always shrank, however, under
almost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purple
rim offered to other eyes--and that is what I take for the restlessness
of envy. It wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, with anyone at
a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I
scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous.
It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.

There must have been on that occasion of the Sing-Sing day--which it
deeply interests me to piece together--some state of connection for some
of us with the hospitalities of Rhinebeck, the place of abode of the
eldest of the Albany uncles--that is of the three most in our view; for
there were two others, the eldest of all a half-uncle only, who formed a
class quite by himself, and the ver