iend of my parents--mustn't
she have held "conversations," in the finest exotic Bostonese, in New
York, Emerson himself lecturing there to admiration?--since the more I
squeeze the sponge of memory the more its stored secretions flow, to
remind me here again that, being with those elders late one evening at
an exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the National Academy, then
confined to scant quarters, I was shown a small full-length portrait of
Miss Fuller, seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long white
shawl, the failure of which to do justice to its original my companions
denounced with some emphasis. Was this work from the hand of Mr. Tom
Hicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned only with the life-sized,
the enormous (as I took it to be) the full-length, the violently
protruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense of
the wonder and the beauty of them, as expressed above all in the image
of a very long and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, standing at
a window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall coloured glasses. The
light of the window playing over the figure and the "treatment" of its
glass and of the flower-pots and the other furniture, passed, by my
impression, for the sign of the master hand; and _was_ it all brave and
charming, or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and helpless? I
put these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing back
into it only the more clingingly and tenderly--wholly regardless in
other words of whether the answers to them at all matter. They matter
doubtless but for fond evocation, and if one tries to evoke one must
neglect none of the arts, one must do it with all the forms. Why I
_should_ so like to do it is another matter--and what "outside
interest" I may suppose myself to create perhaps still another: I
fatuously proceed at any rate, I make so far as I can the small warm
dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century close about us.

VI

I see a small and compact and ingenuous society, screened in somehow
conveniently from north and west, but open wide to the east and
comparatively to the south and, though perpetually moving up Broadway,
none the less constantly and delightfully walking down it. Broadway was
the feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one's
childhood, and it stretched, and prodigiously, from Union Square to
Barnum's great American Museum by the City Hall--or only went