y youngest, who, with lively
interests of his own, had still less attention for us than either of his
three brothers. The house at Rhinebeck and all its accessories (which
struck our young sense as innumerable,) in especial the great bluff of
the Hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, though
as the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there at all events the
gently-groaning--ever so gently and dryly--Albany grandmother, with the
Albany cousins as to whom I here discriminate, her two adopted
daughters, maturest and mildest of the general tribe, must have paused
for a stay; a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with the
New York contingent, somewhere sociably achieved, for the befriending of
juvenile Gussy. It shimmers there, the whole circumstance, with I scarce
know what large innocence of charity and ease; the Gussy-pretext, for
reunion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of the
interests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, each
to-day so touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all gentle and
generous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetly
proof against ennui--unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never,
_never_ to feel bored--and thankful for the smallest aesthetic or
romantic mercies. My vision loses itself withal in vaster
connections--above all in my general sense of the then grand newness of
the Hudson River Railroad; so far at least as its completion to Albany
was concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in a
position to appraise. The time had been when the steamboat had to
content us--and I feel how amply it must have done so as I recall the
thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the Albany
waterside, the night of huge strange paddling and pattering and
shrieking and creaking once ended, and contrast with it all certain long
sessions in the train at an age and in conditions when neither train nor
traveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as I
recast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude.
The elements here indeed are much confused and mixed--I must have known
that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in
relation to Rhinebeck only; an _etape_, doubtless, on the way to New
York, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of
any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I