rough much of the
after time indeed most of those early indigenous vogues and literary
flurries: so few of those that brushed by my childhood had been other
than a tinkling that suddenly stopped. I am afraid I mean that what was
touching was rather the fact that the tinkle _could_ penetrate than the
fact that it died away; the light of criticism might have beat so
straight--if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn't
waved it away--on the aesthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly
_by_ the tinkle. The Scarlet Letter and The Seven Gables had the deep
tone as much as one would; but of the current efforts of the imagination
they were alone in having it till Walt Whitman broke out in the later
fifties--and I was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after.
An absorbed perusal of The Lamplighter was what I was to achieve at the
fleeting hour I continue to circle round; that romance was on every
one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends
for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality--that of the improper
Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question
of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois,
could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman
achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however,
but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and
getting out of control by generic excess. There was no rage at any rate
in The Lamplighter, over which I fondly hung and which would have been
my first "grown-up" novel--it had been soothingly offered me for
that--had I consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. I
couldn't have said what it lacked for the character, I only had my
secret reserves, and when one blest afternoon on the New Brighton boat I
waded into The Initials I saw how right I had been. The Initials _was_
grown-up and the difference thereby exquisite; it came over me with the
very first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which I
had retired with it--all in spite of the fact too that my attention was
distracted by a pair of remarkable little girls who lurked there out of
more public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing.

That must have been a rich hour, for I mix the marvel of the Boon
Children, strange pale little flowers of the American theatre, with my
conscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our