me in fact as a revelation of
representational brightness and charm that pitched once for all in these
matters my young sense of what should be.

Ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation which the Broadway of
the 'fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. If one
wanted pictures there _were_ pictures, as large, I seem to remember, as
the side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and lustre of surface
that I was never afterwards to see surpassed. We were shown without
doubt, under our genial law here too, everything there was, and as I
cast up the items I wonder, I confess, what ampler fare we could have
dealt with. The Duesseldorf school commanded the market, and I think of
its exhibition as firmly seated, going on from year to year--New York,
judging now to such another tune, must have been a brave patron of that
manufacture; I believe that scandal even was on occasion not evaded,
rather was boldly invoked, though of what particular sacrifices to the
pure plastic or undraped shocks to bourgeois prejudice the comfortable
German genius of that period may have been capable history has kept no
record. New accessions, at any rate, vividly new ones, in which the
freshness and brightness of the paint, particularly lustrous in our
copious light, enhanced from time to time the show, which I have the
sense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visiting and which comes back
to me with some vagueness as installed in a disaffected church, where
gothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a mild order helped
the importance. No impression here, however, was half so momentous as
that of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. Leutze, which showed us
Washington crossing the Delaware in a wondrous flare of projected
gaslight and with the effect of a revelation to my young sight of the
capacity of accessories to "stand out." I live again in the thrill of
that evening--which was the greater of course for my feeling it, in my
parents' company, when I should otherwise have been in bed. We went
down, after dinner, in the Fourteenth Street stage, quite as if going to
the theatre; the scene of exhibition was near the Stuyvesant Institute
(a circumstance stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, echoes
probably of lectures discussed at home, yet at which my attendance had
doubtless conveniently lapsed,) but Mr. Leutze's drama left behind any
paler proscenium. We gaped responsive to every item, lost in the marvel