Sentence:  And all this too shall pass away : it came to him out of some dim corner of memory from a church service when he <WSD>was</WSD> a boy - yes , in a white church with a thin spur steeple in the patriarchal Hudson Valley , where a feeling of plenitude was normal in those English Dutch manors with their well-fed squires . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)