athered, that he glances at me out of the Paris period,
fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his
breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an
appeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes of
mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite richly
laid upon me at the time--I get it all back--that he, two or three years
older than my elder brother and dipped more early, as well as held more
firmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of which we all
together, though with our differences of consistency, recognised, was
the positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poor
for ourselves, could do at its best and with clay originally and
domestically kneaded to the right plasticity; besides which he shone, to
my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in
his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intensely
accent-giving stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly imagined
and so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the Luxembourg and
through the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. We were to
see him a little--but two or three times--three or four years later,
when, just before our own return, he had come back to America for the
purpose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard Law School; and to
see him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, as
livingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself;
always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been put
through that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully,
some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as
from a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much;
it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. He
did give out, a little, on occasion--speaking, that is, on my different
plane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother; he gave
out, it appeared, as they walked together across shining Newport sands,
some fragment, some beginning of a very youthful poem that "Europe" had,
with other results, moved him to, and a faint thin shred of which was to
stick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality:

"Harold, rememberest thou the day,
We rode along the Appian Way?
Neglected tomb and altar cast
Their lengthening shadow o'er t