s at me there as out of a thin golden
haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing
pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life
in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everything
having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of
course. Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a
tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our
childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as
with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in
but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or
were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous
hobbledehoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and I catch its
pure breath, at our infantile Albany, as the very air of long summer
afternoons--occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet
beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden
peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a
country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange
legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose
familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of
dim family ramifications and local allusions--mystifications
always--that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; tasting
above all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighing
widowed grandmother, Catherine Barber by birth, whose attitude was a
resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed an
hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. What she
_liked_, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the "fiction
of the day," the novels, at that time promptly pirated, of Mrs. Trollope
and Mrs. Gore, of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubback and the Misses Kavanagh and
Aguilar, whose very names are forgotten now, but which used to drive
her away to quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me bent
forward on a table with the book held out at a distance and a tall
single candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort, in that
age of sparer and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes.
There is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects in the
fragment of a "spiritual autobiography," the reminiscences of a
so-called Stephen Dewhurst printed by W. J. (1885) in The Literary