ed density of understanding, made us an
unexampled and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the American
heaven, a lamentable case. Of course even the office and the "store"
leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme of
manners to be accounted for; still there must have been vast numbers of
people about us for whom, under the usages, the assault on the
imagination from without was much stronger and the filling-in of the
general picture much richer. It was exactly by the lack of that
filling-in that we--we more especially who lived at near view of my
father's admirable example--had been thrown so upon the inward life. No
one could ever have taken to it, even in the face of discouragement,
more kindly and naturally than he; but the situation had at least that
charm that, in default of so many kinds of the outward, people had their
choice of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and might practise
those kinds with whatever consistency, intensity and brilliancy. Of our
father's perfect gift for practising _his_ kind I shall have more to
say; but I meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitution
which kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost nothing
but each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessings
in disguise.

There were "artists" in the prospect--didn't Mr. Tom Hicks and Mr. Paul
Duggan and Mr. C. P. Cranch and Mr. Felix Darley, this last worthy of a
wider reputation, capable perhaps even of a finer development, than he
attained, more or less haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also the
sense of others, landscapist Cropseys and Coles and Kensetts, and
bust-producing Iveses and Powerses and Moziers, hovering in an outer
circle? There were authors not less, some of them vague and female and
in this case, as a rule, glossily ringletted and monumentally
breastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of
George Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Ripley and Charles Dana and N.
P. Willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative
obscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. Bryant, Washington Irving and E.
A. Poe--the last-named of whom I cite not so much because he was
personally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken
him) as by reason of that predominant lustre in him which our small
opening minds themselves already recognised and which makes me wonder
to-day at the legend of the native