, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover all
about clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when I
add them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circuses
under tents set up in vacant lots, with which New York appears at that
time to have bristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken for
most other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. And the
case is aggravated as I remember Franconi's, which we more or less
haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental
effect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with Roman chariot-races up
there among the deserts of Twenty-ninth Street or wherever; considerably
south, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations that
gave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since,
following--not _passibus aequis_, alas--the London structure of 1851,
this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the Paris Palais de
l'Industrie of 1855. Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those
occasions on which I dragged--if I must here once more speak for myself
only--after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember
being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and
very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome
buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was
somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over,"
which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in
some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly,
the Albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of big
European Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enormous Christ and the
Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of dark
maroon walls. If this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, and
we rose to it on the wings of wonder; never were we afterwards to see
great showy sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of whatever
period or school, without some renewal of that charmed Thorwaldsen hour,
some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweetness with
which the great white images had affected us under their supper-table
gaslight. The Crystal Palace was vast and various and dense, which was
what Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of impressions
that were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find
foreign words and practices; over which formi