ivilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which they
struggled at all successfully. It is for some record of the question of
taste, of the consciousness of an aesthetic appeal, as reflected in forms
and aspects, that I shall like best to testify; as the promise and the
development of these things on our earlier American scene are the more
interesting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finer
attention. The plain and happy profusions and advances and successes, as
one looks back, reflect themselves at every turn; the quick beats of
material increase and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell of
them and throw up their caps for them; but the edifying matters to
recapture would be the adventures of the "higher criticism" so far as
there was any--and so far too as it might bear on the real quality and
virtue of things; the state of manners, the terms of intercourse, the
care for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reaction
generally. However, any breasting of those deep waters must be but in
the form for me of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly overtakes and
arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life
in the situation I speak of was such as to make a large defensive
verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us,
play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide--too
high a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of the ugly and the
graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly--when
it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hooded
and guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it must
really have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposure
permitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediately
near, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a little
ease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?--so that when
amiable friends, arriving from New York by the boat, came to see us,
there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view of
the pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse and
rude public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle walk or a garden
nook in afternoon shade. I recall my prompt distaste, a strange
precocity of criticism, for so much aridity--since of what lost Arcadia,
at that age, had I really had the least glimpse?

Our scant margin must