To recover anything like the full
treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live
over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with
whatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer and
thinner passages, after the manner of every one's experience; and the
effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my
subject again and again difficult--so inseparably and beautifully they
seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation
or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant that
aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they
showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that I
might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them,
using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at
the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide--to
see the world within begin to "compose" with a grace of its own round
the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such
then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and
copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the
blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of
differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each
of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect
to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as
of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. To which I
may add perhaps that I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred,
of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and
recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very
scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to
experience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the
scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly
and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated
and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness and that
play of genius in him of which I had never had a doubt from the first.

The "first" then--since I retrace our steps to the start, for the
pleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plant
themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again--the first began
long ago, far off, and yet glimmer