There was no enviable
bric-a-brac, with its provoking legend of cheapness, in the room
in which I had seen her. Such a fact as that suggested bareness,
but nonetheless it worked happily into the sentimental
interest I had always taken in the early movements of my
countrymen as visitors to Europe. When Americans went abroad
in 1820 there was something romantic, almost heroic in it,
as compared with the perpetual ferryings of the present hour,
when photography and other conveniences have annihilated surprise.
Miss Bordereau sailed with her family on a tossing brig,
in the days of long voyages and sharp differences; she had her
emotions on the top of yellow diligences, passed the night
at inns where she dreamed of travelers' tales, and was struck,
on reaching the Eternal City, with the elegance of Roman pearls
and scarfs. There was something touching to me in all that,
and my imagination frequently went back to the period.
If Miss Bordereau carried it there of course Jeffrey Aspern
at other times had done so a great deal more. It was a much
more important fact, if one were looking at his genius critically,
that he had lived in the days before the general transfusion.
It had happened to me to regret that he had known Europe at all;
I should have liked to see what he would have written without
that experience, by which he had incontestably been enriched.
But as his fate had ordered otherwise I went with him--
I tried to judge how the Old World would have struck him.
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