afterwards to know a luxury of emergence--this, I mean, while one still
"cared," in general, as one was sooner or later to stop caring.
Infinitely interesting to recover, in the history of a mind, for those
concerned, these movements of the spirit, these tides and currents of
growth--though under the inconvenience for the historian of such
ramifications of research that here at any rate I feel myself warned
off. There appeared to us at Newport the most interesting, much, of the
Albany male cousins, William James Temple--coming, oddly enough, first
from Yale and then from Harvard; so that by contact and example the
practicability of a like experience might have been, and doubtless was,
put well before us. "Will" Temple, as we were in his short life too
scantly to know him, had made so luckless, even if so lively a start
under one alma mater that the appeal to a fresh parentship altogether
appears to have been judged the best remedy for his case: he entered
Harvard jumping, if I mistake not, a couple of years of the
undergraduate curriculum, and my personal memory of these reappearances
is a mere recapture of admiration, of prostration, before him. The
dazzled state, under his striking good looks and his manly charm, was
the common state; so that I disengage from it no presumption of a
particular plea playing in our own domestic air for his temporary
Cambridge setting; he was so much too radiant and gallant and personal,
too much a character and a figure, a splendid importance in himself, to
owe the least glamour to settings; an advantage that might have seemed
rather to be shed on whatever scene by himself in consenting to light it
up. He made all life for the hour a foreground, and one that we none of
us would have quitted for a moment while he was there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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