immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort
was to _be_ exposed--in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal
predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted
that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places
in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure,
sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was
clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready,
even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried
on, disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were
"sympathetic," though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to
recognise or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that
is of transmitted, ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly
to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to
Paris. The bright and empty air was as void of "careers" for a choice as
of cathedral towers for a sketcher, and I passed my younger time, till
within a year or two of the Civil War, with an absolute vagueness of
impression as to how the political life of the country was carried on.
The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three
classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. This last great man
must have represented for us a class in himself; as if to be "political"
was just to _be_ Daniel Webster in his proper person and with room left
over for nobody else. That he should have filled the sky of public life
from pole to pole, even to a childish consciousness not formed in New
England and for which that strenuous section was but a name in the
geography-book, is probably indeed a sign of how large, in the general
air, he comparatively loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank to
our young vision, I discern, till, later on, in Paris, I saw--for at
that unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to
"meet"--Charles Sumner; with whose name indeed there further connects
itself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before:
the gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a small
old-world _hotel_ or pavilion looking out on the Avenue des Champs
Elysees, slightly above the Rond-Point and just opposite the
antediluvian Jardin d'Hiver (who remembers the Jardin d'Hiver, who
remembers the ancient lodges of the _octroi_, the pair of them facing
each other at the Barriere de l