King Coffin

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In the prime assurance of his youth, in the fresh arrogance of his wisdom, and power in wisdom, with a sense of his extreme handsomeness, if not indeed beauty (for Gerta had said more than once that he was beautiful, and his own mirror had pleasantly corroborated this) Jasper Ammen leaned from the sixth floor window and projected his own image upon the world. In particular, he projected it against the sunset: a more melancholy, and therefore more pleasant, form of this occupation, and one in which he frequently indulged. The sunset lay long and level and bright-banded above the hills of Belmont and Mount Auburn. Against a streak of white light, horizontal and cold, the black tower of the cemetery marked the presence, or the absence, of Henry James; to the right of it, slowly darkening, as the evening deepened to mystery, ran the irregular line of trees toward Belmont. And as he leaned his cheek on his left hand he felt once again how all this scene, this width and depth of air and light, was becoming himself. This was all Jasper Ammen, a singular magnification or distillation of his own essence, it was himself gone abroad for the greater exercise of his subtlety and power. The tower was his strength, the trees were his strength, the evolving and changing of the light were merely, as it were, the play of his thought over an earth everywhere his own; and the clear abyss of twilit sky, the lucid profundity into which he now figured himself as looking not upward but directly and amazingly downward, was simply his own mind. Below him, across the little street, the horse chestnut tree was uncurling its first soft-russet fingers of leaf: in another three weeks, it would blossom, and this too he felt as a precise and surer emanation of himself.

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