a dazzling example the rare assurance
of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop, who, though still in
jackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of Serjeant Buzfuz's
exposure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel at the high sufficiency
of young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Winthrop--in which romantic
impression it is perhaps after all (though with the consecration of one
or two of the novels of the once-admired Theodore of that name, which so
remarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the place is embalmed.

I must not forget indeed that I throw in also Mr. Coe--even if with
less assured a hand; by way of a note on those higher flights of power
and promise that I at this time began to see definitely determined in my
brother. As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most
characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially
under the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlour; and not as
with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but
easily, freely and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage
of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue
rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all
was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my
view. These were a matter of course--he recurred, he passed nearer, but
in his moments of ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of his
disappearances. Didn't he always when within my view light them up and
justify them by renewed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole sense
of him as formed for assimilations scarce conceivable made our gaps of
contact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. Humility had
nothing to do with it--as little even as envy would have had; I was
below humility, just as we were together outside of competition,
mutually "hors concours." _His_ competitions were with others--in which
how wasn't he, how could he not be, successful? while mine were with
nobody, or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heaven
knows I neither braved them nor missed them. That winter, as I recover
it, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position or
whereabouts in the upper air definite--I must have taken it for granted
before, but could now in a manner measure it; and the freshness of this
sense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, I divine, with the
effect of our moving, with the rest of