Out of the mentions made of this effusion I
gathered that it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool,
and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness,
often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I
believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy
which pictured to him all high aims as possible of realization through
talk. Often he was so happy that he could have danced like a child;
and he laughed merrily like one; and the quick, upward lift of his
head, which his great height induced him to hold, as a rule, slightly
bent forward,--this rapid, playful lift, and the glance, bright and
eager though not deep, which sparkled upon you, were sweet and good to
see. Yet I have noticed his condition as pale and dolorous enough,
before the event of his noble daughter's splendid success. But such
was not his character; circumstances had enslaved him, and he appeared
thin and forlorn by incongruous accident, like a lamb in chains. He
might have been taken for a centenarian when I beheld him one day
slowly and pathetically constructing a pretty rustic fence before his
gabled brown house, as if at the unreasonable command of some
latter-day Pharaoh. Ten years afterward he was, on the contrary, a
Titan: gay, silvery-locked, elegant, ready to begin his life over
again.
Alcott represented to me a fairy element in the up-country region in
which I so often saw him. I heard that he walked the woods for the
purpose of finding odd coils of tree-roots and branches, which would
on the instant suggest to him an ingenious use in his art of rustic
building.
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