nt of her living in Elk Street, the name itself vaguely
portentous, as through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exorcised,
and more or less under the high brow of that Capitol which, as aloft
somewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet
impressive, at the end of almost any Albany vista of reference. I have
seen other capitols since, but the whole majesty of the matter must have
been then distilled into my mind--even though the connection was
indirect and the concrete image, that of the primitive structure, long
since pretentiously and insecurely superseded--so that, later on, the
impression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. Had it not
moreover been reinforced at the time, for that particular Capitoline
hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was a son of Mr.
Martin Van Buren, and that _he_ was the President? This at least led the
imagination on--or leads in any case my present imagination of that one;
ministering to what I have called the soft confusion.

The confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when,
ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of conscious
and educated little returns to the place; for the education of New York,
enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. The
images I really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but with
the sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house of
my parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins,
numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured for us; the various
brood presided over by my father's second sister, Catherine James, who
had married at a very early age Captain Robert Temple, U.S.A. Both these
parents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the two
eldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary scene; this
being true in particular of three of them, the sharply differing
brothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, radiant and rare,
extinguished in her first youth, but after having made an impression on
many persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in the
harmonious circle, for all time, matter of sacred legend and reference,
of associated piety. Those and others with them were the numerous
dawnings on which in many cases the deepening and final darknesses were
so soon to follow: our father's family was to offer such a chronicle of
early deaths, arrested careers,