. . .
And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about
with me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as
he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman,
there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his;
tree-top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his
mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably
Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and
chattered in the brain of the old divine.
CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET
THOSE who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of
their recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories
of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in
the attire of a buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or
murder to be done, on the playground of their youth. But the
memories are a fairy gift which cannot be worn out in using. After
a dozen services in various tales, the little sunbright pictures of
the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament
defaced, not a tint impaired. GLUCK UND UNGLUCK WIRD GESANG, if
Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the original re-
embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to wonder
at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to
fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.
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