If these remarks illustrate in their number the inevitable bent of the
remark to multiply within me as an effect of fraternal evocation I
thereby but stick the more to my subject, or in other words to the
much-peopled scene, as I found it; which I should scarce have found
without him. Peopled as it was with _his_ people, which they at first
struck me as markedly being, it led me then to take the company, apart
from F. J. Child, for whatever he all vividly and possessively
pronounced it; I having for a long time but the scantest company of my
own, even at the Law School, where my fellow-disciples could bear the
name for me only as a troop of actors might have done on that further
side of footlights to which I never went round. This last at least with
few exceptions, while there were none to the exquisite rule, as I
positively to-day feel it, of my apprehension of William's cluster as a
concern of his--interesting exactly because of that reference. Any
concern of his was thus a thing already charged with life, _his_ life
over and above its own, if it happened by grace to have any comparable;
which, as I pick out the elements again from the savoury Upham shades,
could indeed be claimed for several of these. I pick out the ardent and
delicate and firm John May, son, as he comes back to me, of a
distinguished Abolitionist of New York State--rare bird; and seen by
that fact in a sort of glamour of picturesque justification, an air
deriving colour from the pre-established gallantry, yet the quiet and
gentlemanly triumph, of his attitude. So at least do I read back into
blurred visions the richest meanings they could have. I pick out for a
not less baffled tribute a particular friend of my brother's and a
comrade of May's, whom I identify on the superficial side but by his
name of Salter and the fact of his studentship in theology; which
pursuit, it comes over me as I write, he must have shared, of homely,
almost of sickly, New England type as he was, with May of the fine
features, the handsome smile, by my resolute recollection, the developed
moustache and short dark pointed beard, the property of vaguely
recalling in fine some old portrait supposedly Spanish (supposedly, and
perhaps to a fantastic tune, by _me_--for I dare say it was by no one
else). Salter had no such references--it even appalled me to have a bit
intelligently to imagine to what origins starved of amenity or colour
his aspect and air, the slope of his shoulders, the mode of growth of
his hair, the relation of his clothes to his person and the relation of
his person to the inevitable needs of intercourse, might refer him; but
there played about him a bright force in the highest and extraordinarily
quick flares of which one felt nothing, while the exhibition lasted, but
his intellectual elegance. He had the distinction of wit--so rare, we
ever feel it to be, when we see it beautifully act; and I remember well
how, as that was indeed for me almost the whole of intellectual
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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