e, by this communication, and
recover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so to
promise; but especially have I it before me that some play of light
criticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker's
more ambitious remarks. For all that, and in spite of oddities of
appearance and type, it was Augustus James who spread widest, in default
of towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and who
covered definite and accessible ground. This ground, the house and
precincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck, harboured our tender years, I
surmise, but at few and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of these
to make it the image of an hospitality liberal as I supposed great
social situations were liberal; suppositions on this score having in
childhood (or at least they had in mine) as little as possible to do
with dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with great views and other
glories, with gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of
gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll; to say
nothing, in particular, of our aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay of
Albany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing-women in
New York, and who floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture,
aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome highbrowed, high-nosed
looseness, of dressing-gowns or streaming shawls (the dowdy, the
delightful shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright benevolent steel
that kept nipping for our charmed advantage: roses and grapes and
peaches and currant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and scraps
of remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. These are mere
scrapings of gold-dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, however
tiny, was to insist all these years on _marking_--on figuring in a whole
complex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that of
worry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed outer galleries,
through hot August evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows, to
the hum of domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the part played,
in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even though
inordinately, arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition of
appearances, by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressions
not arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste,
as one may say, of the little intelligence, happening to be such as the
fond