Chapter XIII (1)

If I add to the foregoing a few lines more from my brother's hand, these are of a day separated by long years from that time of our youth of which I have treated. Addressed after the immense interval to an admirable friend whom I shall not name here, they yet so vividly refer--and with something I can only feel as the first authority--to one of the most prized interests of our youth that, under the need of still failing to rescue so many of these values from the dark gulf, I find myself insist the more on a place here, before I close, for that presence in our early lives as to which my brother's few words say so much. To have so promptly and earnestly spoken of Mary Temple the younger in this volume is indeed I think to have offered a gage for my not simply leaving her there. The opportunity not so to leave her comes at any rate very preciously into my hands, and I can not better round off this record than by making the most of it. The letter to which William alludes is one that my reader will presently recognise. It had come back to him thus clearly at the far end of time.

I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which
revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in
all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than
hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now.
As for knowing her as _she_ is now--??!! I find that she means as
much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did,
being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience
of people. Thank you once more for what you have done.

The testimony so acknowledged was a letter in a copious succession, the product of little more than one year, January '69 to February '70, sacredly preserved by the recipient; who was not long after the day of my brother's acknowledgment to do me the honour of communicating to me the whole series. He could have done nothing to accord more with the spirit in which I have tried to gather up something of the sense of our far-off past, his own as well as that of the rest of us; and no loose clue that I have been able to recover unaided touches into life anything like such a tract of the time-smothered consciousness. More charming and interesting things emerge for me than I can point to in their order--but they will make, I think, their own appeal. It need only further be premised that our delightful young cousin had had from some months back to begin to reckon with the progressive pulmonary weakness of which the letters tell the sad story. Also, I can scarce help saying, the whole world of the old New York, that of the earlier dancing years, shimmers out for me from the least of her allusions.

I will write you as nice a letter as I can, but would much rather
have a good talk with you. As I can't have the best thing I am
putting up with the second-best, contrary to my pet theory. I feel
as if I were in heaven to-day--all because the day is splendid and
I have been driving about all the morning in a small sleigh in the
fresh air and sunshine, until I found that I had in spite of
myself, for the time being, stopped asking the usual inward
question of why I was born. I am not going to Canada--I know no
better reason for this than because I said I _was_ going. My
brother-in-law makes such a clamour when I propose departure that I
am easily overcome by his kindness and my own want of energy.
Besides, it is great fun to live here; the weather just now is
grand, and I knock about all day in a sleigh, and do nothing but
enjoy it and meditate. Then we are so near town that we often go in
for the day to shop and lunch with some of our numerous friends,
returning with a double relish for the country. We all went in on a
spree the other night and stayed at the Everett House; from which,
as a starting-point we poured ourselves in strong force upon Mrs.
Gracie King's ball--a very grand affair, given for a very pretty
Miss King, at Delmonico's. Our raid consisted of thirteen Emmets
and a moderate supply of Temples, and the ball was a great success.
It was two years since I had been to one and I enjoyed it so much
that I mean very soon to repeat the experiment--at the next
Assembly if possible. The men in society, in New York, this winter,
are principally a lot of feeble-minded boys; but I was fortunate
enough to escape them, as my partner for the German was a man of
thirty-five, the solitary _man_, I believe, in the room. Curiously
enough, I had danced my last German, two years before, in that very
place and with the same person. He is a Mr. Lee, who has spent
nearly all his life abroad; two of his sisters have married German
princes, and from knocking about so much he has become a thorough
cosmopolite. As he is intelligent, with nothing to do but amuse
himself, he is a very agreeable partner, and I mean to dance with
him again as soon as possible. I don't know why I have tried your
patience by writing so about a person you have never seen; unless
it's to show you that I haven't irrevocably given up the world, the
flesh and the devil, but am conscious of a faint charm about them
still when taken in small doses. I agree with you perfectly about
Uncle Henry--I should think he would be very irritating to the
legal mind; he is not at all satisfactory even to mine. Have you
seen much of Willy James lately? That is a rare creature, and one
in whom my intellect, if you will pardon the misapplication of the
word, takes more solid satisfaction than in almost anybody. I
haven't read Browning's new book--I mean to wait till you are by to
explain it to me--which reminds me, along with what you say about
wishing for the spring, that we shall go to North Conway next
summer, and that in that case you may as well make up your mind to
come and see us there. I can't wait longer than that for the
Browning readings. (Which would have been of The Ring and the
Book.) Arthur Sedgwick has sent me Matthew Arnold's photograph,
which Harry had pronounced so disappointing. I don't myself, on the
whole, find it so; on the contrary, after having looked at it much,
I like it--it quite harmonises with my notion of him, and I have
always had an affection for him. You must tell me something that
you are _sure_ is true--I don't care much what it may be, I will
take your word for it. Things get into a muddle with me--how can I
give you "a start on the way of righteousness"? You know that way
better than I do, and the only advice I can give you is not to stop
saying your prayers. I hope God may bless you, and beyond those
things I hardly know what is right, and therefore what to wish you.
Good-bye.

"North Conway" in the foregoing has almost the force for me of a wizard's wand; the figures spring up again and move in a harmony that is not of the fierce present; the sense in particular of the August of '65 shuts me in to its blest unawarenesses not less than to all that was then exquisite in its current certainties and felicities; the fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us gather under the rustling pines--and I admire, precisely, the arrival, the bright revelation as I recover it, of the so handsome young man, marked with military distinction but already, with our light American promptitude, addressed to that high art of peace in which a greater eminence awaited him, of whom this most attaching member of the circle was to make four years later so wise and steady a confidant. Our circle I fondly call it, and doubtless then called it, because in the light of that description I could most rejoice in it, and I think of it now as having formed a little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all so instinctively sane and secure association and conversation, with all its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and its earnestness protected and directed so much more from within than from without, that I ask myself, perhaps too fatuously, whether any such right conditions for the play of young intelligence and young friendship, the reading of Matthew Arnold and Browning, the discussion of a hundred human and personal things, the sense of the splendid American summer drawn out to its last generosity, survives to this more complicated age. I doubt if there be circles to-day, and seem rather to distinguish confusedly gangs and crowds and camps, more propitious, I dare say, to material affluence and physical riot than anything we knew, but not nearly so appointed for ingenious and ingenuous talk. I think of our interplay of relation as attuned to that fruitful freedom of what we took for speculation, what we didn't recoil from as boundless curiosity--as the consideration of life, that is, the personal, the moral inquiry and adventure at large, so far as matter for them had up to then met our view--I think of this fine quality in our scene with no small confidence in its having been rare, or to be more exact perhaps, in its having been possible to the general American felicity and immunity as it couldn't otherwise or elsewhere have begun to be. Merely to say, as an assurance, that such relations shone with the light of "innocence" is of itself to breathe on them wrongly or rudely, is uncouthly to "defend" them--as if the very air that consciously conceived and produced them didn't all tenderly and amusedly take care of them. I at any rate figure again, to my customary positive piety, all the aspects now; that in especial of my young orphaned cousins as mainly composing the maiden train and seeming as if they still had but yesterday brushed the morning dew of the dear old Albany naturalness; that of the venerable, genial, erect great-aunt, their more immediately active guardian, a model of antique spinsterhood appointed to cares such as even renewals of wedlock could scarce more have multiplied for her, and thus, among her many ancient and curious national references--one was tempted to call them--most impressive by her striking resemblance to the portraits, the most benignant, of General Washington. She might have represented the mother, no less adequately than he represented the father, of their country. I can only feel, however, that what particularly drew the desired circle sharpest for me was the contribution to it that I had been able to effect by introducing the companion of my own pilgrimage, who was in turn to introduce a little later the great friend of _his_ then expanding situation, restored with the close of the War to civil pursuits and already deep in them; the interesting pair possessed after this fashion of a quantity of common fine experience that glittered as so much acquired and enjoyed luxury--all of a sort that I had no acquisition whatever to match. I remember being happy in that I might repeatedly point our moral, under permission (for we were always pointing morals), with this brilliant advantage of theirs even if I might with none of my own; and I of course knew--what was half the beauty--that if we were just the most delightful loose band conceivable, and immersed in a regular revel of all the harmonies, it was largely by grace of the three quite exceptional young men who, thanks in part to the final sublime coach-drive of other days, had travelled up from Boston with their preparation to admire inevitably quickened. I was quite willing to offer myself as exceptional through being able to promote such exceptions and see them justified to waiting apprehension. There was a dangling fringe, there were graceful accessories and hovering shades, but, essentially, we of the true connection made up the drama, or in other words, for the benefit of my imagination, reduced the fond figment of the Circle to terms of daily experience. If drama we could indeed feel this as being, I hasten to add, we owed it most of all to our just having such a heroine that everything else inevitably came. Mary Temple was beautifully and indescribably _that_--in the technical or logical as distinguished from the pompous or romantic sense of the word; wholly without effort or desire on her part--for never was a girl less consciously or consentingly or vulgarly dominant--everything that took place around her took place as if primarily in relation to her and in her interest: that is in the interest of drawing her out and displaying her the more. This too without her in the least caring, as I say--in the deep, the morally nostalgic indifferences that were the most finally characteristic thing about her--whether such an effect took place or not; she liked nothing in the world so much as to see others fairly exhibited; not as they might best please her by being, but as they might most fully reveal themselves, their stuff and their truth: which was the only thing that, after any first flutter for the superficial air or grace in an acquaintance, could in the least fix her attention. She had beyond any equally young creature I have known a sense for verity of character and play of life in others, for their acting out of their force or their weakness, whatever either might be, at no matter what cost to herself; and it was this instinct that made her care so for life in general, just as it was her being thereby so engaged in that tangle that made her, as I have expressed it, ever the heroine of the scene. Life claimed her and used her and beset her--made her range in her groping, her naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end of the scale. No one felt more the charm of the actual--only the actual comprised for her kinds of reality (those to which her letters perhaps most of all testify), that she saw treated round her for the most part either as irrelevant or as unpleasant. She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder; and I think it is because one was to see her launched on that adventure in such bedimmed, such almost tragically compromised conditions that one is caught by her title to the heroic and pathetic mark. It is always difficult for us after the fact not to see young things who were soon to be lost to us as already distinguished by their fate; this particular victim of it at all events might well have made the near witness ask within himself how her restlessness of spirit, the finest reckless impatience, was to be assuaged or "met" by the common lot. One somehow saw it nowhere about us as up to her terrible young standard of the interesting--even if to say this suggests an air of tension, a sharpness of importunity, than which nothing could have been less like her. The charming, irresistible fact was that one had never seen a creature with such lightness of forms, a lightness all her own, so inconsequently grave at the core, or an asker of endless questions with such apparent lapses of care. It is true that as an effect of the state of health which during the year '69 grew steadily worse the anxious note and serious mind sound in her less intermittently than by her former wont.

This might be headed with that line of a hymn, "Hark, from the
tombs etc.!"--but perhaps it won't prove as bad as that. It looks
pretty doubtful still, but I have a sort of feeling that I shall
come round this one time more; by which I don't mean to brag! The
"it" of which I speak is of course my old enemy hemorrhage, of
which I have had within the last week seven pretty big ones and
several smaller, hardly worth mentioning. I don't know what has
come over me--I can't stop them; but, as I said, I mean to try and
beat them yet. Of course I am in bed, where I shall be
indefinitely--not allowed to speak one word, literally, even in a
whisper. The reason I write this is because I don't think it will
hurt me at all--if I take it easy and stop when I feel tired. It is
a pleasant break in the monotony of gruel and of thinking of the
grave--and then too a few words from somebody who is strong and
active in the good old world (as it seems to me now) would be very
refreshing. But don't tell anyone I have written, because it will
be sure to reach the ears of my dear relatives and will cause them
to sniff the air and flounce! You see I am a good deal of a
baby--in the sense of not wanting the reproaches of my relatives
on this or any other subject.... All the Emmets are so good and
kind that I found, when it came to the point, that there was a good
deal to make life attractive, and that if the choice were given me
I would much rather stay up here on the solid earth, in the air and
sunshine, with an occasional sympathetic glimpse of another
person's soul, than to be put down underground and say good-bye for
ever to humanity, with all its laughter and its sadness. Yet you
mustn't think me now in any _special_ danger of dying, or even in
low spirits, for it isn't so--the doctor tells me I am _not_ in
danger, even if the hemorrhages should keep on. However, "you can't
fool a regular boarder," as Mr. Holmes would say, and I can't see
why there is any reason to think they will heal a week hence, when
I shall be still weaker, if they can't heal now. Still, they _may_
be going to stop--I haven't had one since yesterday at 4, and now
it's 3; nearly twenty-four hours. I am of a hopeful temperament and
not easily scared, which is in my favour. If this _should_ prove to
be the last letter you get from me, why take it for a good-bye;
I'll keep on the lookout for you in the spirit world, and shall be
glad to see you when you come there, provided it's a better place
than this. Elly is in New York, enjoying herself immensely, and I
haven't let her know how ill I have been, as there were to be
several parties this last week and I was afraid it might spoil her
fun. I didn't mean you to infer from my particularising Willy
James's intellect that the rest of him isn't to my liking--he is
one of the very few people in this world that I love. He has the
largest heart as well as the largest head, and is thoroughly
interesting to me. He is generous and affectionate and full of
sympathy and humanity--though you mustn't tell him I say so, lest
he should think I have been telling you a lie to serve my own
purposes. Good-bye.

I should have little heart, I confess, for what is essentially the record of a rapid illness if it were not at the same time the image of an admirable soul. Surrounded as she was with affection she had yet greatly to help herself, and nothing is thus more penetrating than the sense, as one reads, that a method of care would have been followed for her to-day, and perhaps followed with signal success, that was not in the healing or nursing range of forty years ago.

It is a week ago to-day, I think, since I last wrote to you, and I
have only had one more hemorrhage--the day after. I feel pretty
sure they have stopped for the present, and I am sitting up in my
room, as bright as possible. Yesterday when I walked across it I
thought I should never be strong again, but now it's quite
different, and so nice to be out of bed that my spirits go up
absurdly. As soon as I am able I am to be taken to town for another
examination, and then when I know my fate I will do the best I can.
This climate is trying, to be sure, but such as it is I've got to
take my chance in it, as there is no one I care enough for, or who
cares enough for me, to take charge of me to Italy, or to the south
anywhere. I don't believe any climate, however good, would be of
the least use to me with people I don't care for. You may let your
moustache grow down to your toes if you like, and I shall but smile
scornfully at your futile precautions.

Of the following, in spite of its length, I can bring myself to abate nothing.

....Well, "to make a long story short," as Hannah (her old nurse)
says, I caught a cold, and it went to the weak spot, and I had
another slight attack of hemorrhage; but I took the necessary steps
at once, stayed in bed and didn't speak for six days, and then it
stopped and I felt better than I had at all since I was first taken
ill. But I began to tire so of such constant confinement to my room
that they promised to take me to town as soon as I was well enough,
and perhaps to the Opera. This of course would have been a wild
excitement for me, and I had charming little plans of music by day
and by night, for a week, which I meant to spend with Mrs.
Griswold. Accordingly a cavalcade set out from here on Monday,
consisting of myself escorted by sisters and friends, who were to
see me safely installed in my new quarters and leave me. I arrived,
bundled up, at Mrs. Griswold's, and had begun to consider myself
already quite emancipated from bondage--so that I was discussing
with my brother-in-law the propriety of my going that evening to
hear Faust, this but the beginning of a mad career on which I
proposed to rush headlong--when Dr. Bassett arrived, who is the
medical man that I had meant to consult during my stay
_incidentally_ and between the pauses in the music. The first thing
he said was: "What are you doing here? Go directly back to the
place you came from and don't come up again till the warm weather.
As for music, you mustn't hear of it or even think of it for two
months." This was pleasant, but there was nothing to be done but
obey; which I did a few hours later, with my trunk still unpacked
and my immediate plan of life somewhat limited.

I say my immediate plan because my permanent found itself by no
means curtailed, but on the contrary expanded and varied in a
manner I had not even dared to hope. This came from what Dr. B.
said subsequently, when he had examined my lungs; that is to say
after he had laid his head affectionately first under one of my
shoulders and then the other, and there kept it solemnly for about
ten minutes, in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous, especially
with Kitty as spectator. His verdict was that my lungs were
_sound_, that he couldn't detect the least evidence of disease, and
that hemorrhage couldn't have come from the lung itself, but from
their membraneous lining, and that of the throat, whatever this may
be. So he gave me to understand that I have as sound a pair of
lungs at present as the next person; in fact from what he said one
would have thought them a pair that a prize-fighter might covet. At
the same time he sent me flying back to the country, with orders
not to get excited, nor to listen to music, nor to speak with
anybody I care for, nor to do anything in short that the
unregenerate nature longs for. This struck my untutored mind as
somewhat inconsistent, and I ventured a gentle remonstrance, which
however was not even listened to, and I was ignominiously thrust
into a car and borne back to Pelham. The problem still bothers me:
either sound lungs are a very dangerous thing to have, or there is
a foul conspiracy on foot to oppress me. Still, I cling to the
consoling thought of my matchless lungs, and this obliterates my
present sufferings.

Harry came to see me before he sailed for Europe; I'm very glad he
has gone, though I don't expect to see him again for a good many
years. I don't think he will come back for a long time, and I hope
it will do him good and that he will enjoy himself--which he hasn't
done for several years. I haven't read all of Faust, but I think I
know the scenes you call divine--at least I know some that are
exquisite. But why do you speak so disparagingly of King David,
whom I always had a weakness for? Think how charming and lovable a
person he must have been, poet, musician and so much else
combined--with however their attendant imperfections. I don't think
I should have cared to be _Queen_ David exactly. I am possessed
with an overpowering admiration and affection for George Eliot. I
don't know why this has so suddenly come over me, but everything I
look at of hers nowadays makes me take a deeper interest in her. I
should love to see her, and I hope Harry will; I asked him to give
my love to her. But I don't remember ever to have heard _you_ speak
of her. Good-bye. I wish conventionality would invent some other
way of ending a letter than "yours truly"; I am so tired of it, and
as one says it to one's shoemaker it would be rather more
complimentary to one's friends to dispense with it altogether and
just sign one's name without anything, after the manner of Miss
Emerson and other free Boston citizens. But I am a slave to
conventionality, and after all _am_ yours truly....

Singularly present has remained to "Harry," as may be imagined, the rapid visit he paid her at Pelham that February; he was spending a couple of days in New York, on a quick decision, before taking ship for England. I was then to make in Europe no such stay as she had forecast--I was away but for fifteen months; though I can well believe my appetite must have struck her as open to the boundless, and can easily be touched again by her generous thought of this as the right compensatory thing for me. That indeed is what I mainly recall of the hour I spent with her--so unforgettable none the less in its general value; our so beautifully agreeing that quite the same course would be the right thing for _her_ and that it was wholly detestable I should be voyaging off without her. But the precious question and the bright aspect of her own still waiting chance made our talk for the time all gaiety; it was, strangely enough, a laughing hour altogether, coloured with the vision of the next winter in Rome, where we should romantically meet: the appearance then being of particular protective friends with Roman designs, under whose wing she might happily travel. She had at that moment been for many weeks as ill as will here have been shown; but such is the priceless good faith of youth that we perfectly kept at bay together the significance of this. I recall no mortal note--nothing but the bright extravagance of her envy; and see her again, in the old-time Pelham parlours, ever so erectly slight and so more than needfully, so transparently, fair (I fatuously took this for "becoming"), glide as swiftly, toss her head as characteristically, laugh to as free a disclosure of the handsome largeish teeth that made her mouth almost the main fact of her face, as if no corner of the veil of the future had been lifted. The house was quiet and spacious for the day, after the manner of all American houses of that age at those hours, and yet spoke of such a possible muster at need of generous, gregarious, neighbouring, sympathising Emmets; in spite of which, withal, the impression was to come back to me as of a child struggling with her ignorance in a sort of pathless desert of the genial and the casual. Three months before I returned to America the struggle had ended. I _was_, as happened, soon to see in London her admiration, and my own, the great George Eliot--a brief glimpse then, but a very impressive, and wellnigh my main satisfaction in which was that I should have my cousin to tell of it. I found the Charles Nortons settled for the time in London, with social contacts and penetrations, a give and take of hospitality, that I felt as wondrous and of some elements of which they offered me, in their great kindness, the benefit; so that I was long to value having owed them in the springtime of '69 five separate impressions of distinguished persons, then in the full flush of activity and authority, that affected my young provincialism as a positive fairytale of privilege. I had a Sunday afternoon hour with Mrs. Lewes at North Bank, no second visitor but my gentle introducer, the younger Miss Norton, sharing the revelation, which had some odd and for myself peculiarly thrilling accompaniments; and then the opportunity of dining with Mr. Ruskin at Denmark Hill, an impression of uneffaced intensity and followed by a like--and yet so unlike--evening of hospitality from William Morris in the medieval mise-en-scene of Queen Square. This had been preceded by a luncheon with Charles Darwin, beautifully benignant, sublimely simple, at Down; a memory to which I find attached our incidental wondrous walk--Mrs. Charles Norton, the too near term of her earthly span then smoothly out of sight, being my guide for the happy excursion--across a private park of great oaks, which I conceive to have been the admirable Holwood and where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, through fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in such places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and scent of renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs that were somehow before aught else the still reach of remembered lines of Tennyson, ached over in nostalgic years. The rarest hour of all perhaps, or at least the strangest, strange verily to the pitch of the sinister, was a vision, provided by the same care, of D. G. Rossetti in the vernal dusk of Queen's House Chelsea--among his pictures, amid his poetry itself, his whole haunting "esthetic," and yet above all bristling with his personality, with his perversity, with anything, as it rather awfully seemed to me, but his sympathy, though it at the same time left one oddly desirous of more of him. These impressions heaped up the measure, goodness knew, of what would serve for Minnie's curiosity--she was familiarly Minnie to us; the point remaining all along, however, that, impatient at having overmuch to wait, I rejoiced in possession of the exact vivid terms in which I should image George Eliot to her. I was much later on to renew acquaintance with that great lady, but I think I scarce exceed in saying that with my so interested cousin's death half the savour of my appreciation had lost itself. Just in those days, that month of April, the latter had made a weak ineffectual move to Philadelphia in quest of physical relief--which expressed at the same time even more one of those reachings out for appeasement of the soul which were never too publicly indulged in, but by which her power to interest the true subjects of her attraction was infinitely quickened. It represented wonderments, I might well indeed have said to myself, even beyond any inspired by the high muse of North Bank.

I suppose I ought to have something special to say after having
been suddenly transplanted to a new place and among new people, yet
there isn't much to tell. I came because they all thought at home
that the climate might do me good; I don't feel, however, any
difference in my sensations between this and New York--if I do it's
in favour of New York. I wish it might turn out that an inland
climate isn't after all necessary for me, as I like the other sort
much better and really think I feel stronger in it too. My doctor
told me that Boston would kill me in six months--though he is
possibly mistaken. I am going to try it a little longer here, and
then go back to Pelham, where I'm pretty sure I shall find myself
better again. It may be that the mental atmosphere is more to me
than any other, for I feel homesick here all the while, or at least
what I call so, being away from what is most _like_ home to me, and
what if I were there I should call tired. The chief object I had in
coming was to listen to Phillips Brooks; I have heard him several
times and am not, I think, disappointed. To be sure he didn't say
anything new or startling, but I certainly oughtn't to have
expected that, though I believe I did have a secret hope that he
was going to expound to me the old beliefs with a clearness that
would convince me for ever and banish doubt. I had placed all my
hopes in him as the one man I had heard of who, progressive in all
other ways, had yet been able to keep his faith firm in the things
that most earnest men have left far behind them. Yet in preaching
to his congregation he doesn't, or didn't, touch the real
difficulties at all. He was leading them forward instead of trying
to make it clear to _me_ that I have any good reason for my
feelings. Still, it was something to feel that he has them too, and
isn't afraid to trust them and live for them. I wonder what he
really does believe or think about it all, and whether he knows the
reaction that comes to me about Thursday, after the enthusiasm and
confidence made by his eloquence and earnestness on Sunday.
To-morrow will be Saturday, and I shall be glad when Sunday comes
to wind me up again. I feel sadly run down to-night and as if I
should like to see some honest old pagan and shake him by the hand.
It will seem all right and easy again soon, I know, but is it
always thus? Is there no more of that undoubting faith in the
world that there used to be? But I won't talk any more about it
now, or I shan't sleep; it is getting late and all themes but the
least interesting must be put away.

"Quaint," as we now say, it at this end of time seems to me that Phillips Brooks, the great Episcopal light of the period, first in Philadelphia and then in Boston, and superior character, excellent, even ardent, thoughtful, genial, practical man, should have appeared to play before her a light possibly of the clear strain, the rich abundance, the straight incidence, that she so desired to think attainable. A large, in fact an enormous, softly massive and sociably active presence, of capacious attention and comforting suggestion, he was a brave worker among those who didn't too passionately press their questions and claims--half the office of such a minister being, no doubt, to abate the high pitch, and the high pitch being by the same token too much Minnie's tendency. She was left with it in the smug Philadelphia visibly on her hands; she had found there after all but a closed door, to which she was blandly directed, rather than an open, and the sigh of her falling back with her disappointment seems still to reach one's ears. She found them too much all round, the stiff blank barriers that, for whatever thumping, didn't "give;" and in fine I like not too faintly to colour this image of her as failing, in her avid young sincerity, to draw from the honest pastor of more satisfied souls any assurance that she could herself honestly apply. I confess that her particular recorded case, slender enough in its lonely unrest, suggests to me a force, or at least a play, of effective criticism more vivid to-day than either of the several rich monuments, honourably as these survive, to Phillips Brooks's positive "success." She had no occasion or no chance to find the delightful harmonising friend in him--which was part of the success for so many others. But her letter goes on after a couple of days--she had apparently not sent the previous part, and it brings her back, we can rejoicingly note, to George Eliot, whose poem, alluded to, must have been The Spanish Gipsy. This work may indeed much less have counted for her than the all-engulfing Mill on the Floss, incomparably privileged production, which shone for young persons of that contemporaneity with a nobleness that nothing under our actual star begins in like case to match. These are great recognitions, but how can I slight for them a mention that has again and again all but broken through in my pages?--that of Francis Boott and his daughter (she to become later on Mrs. Frank Duveneck and to yield to the same dismal decree of death before her time that rested on so many of the friends of our youth). When I turn in thought to the happiness that our kinswoman was still to have known in her short life, for all her disaster, Elizabeth Boott, delightful, devoted and infinitely under the charm, at once hovers for me; this all the more, I hasten to add, that we too on our side, and not least Mary Temple herself, were under the charm, and that _that_ charm, if less immediately pointed, affected all our young collective sensibility as a wondrous composite thing. There was the charm for us--if I must not again speak in assurance but for myself--that "Europe," the irrepressible even as the _ewig Weibliche_ of literary allusion was irrepressible, had more than anything else to do with; and then there was the other that, strange to say (strange as I, once more, found myself feeling it) owed nothing of its authority to anything so markedly out of the picture. The spell to which I in any case most piously sacrificed, most cultivated the sense of, was ever of this second cast--and for the simple reason that the other, serene in its virtue, fairly insolent in its pride, needed no rites and no care. It must be allowed that there was nothing composite in any spell proceeding, whether directly or indirectly, from the great Albany connection: this form of the agreeable, through whatever appeals, could certainly not have been more of a piece, as we say--more of a single superfused complexion, an element or principle that we could in the usual case ever so easily and pleasantly account for. The case of that one in the large number of my cousins whom we have seen to be so incomparably the most interesting was of course anything but the usual; yet the Albany origin, the woodnote wild, sounded out even amid her various voices and kept her true, in her way, to something we could only have called local, or perhaps family, type. Essentially, however, she had been a free incalculable product, a vivid exception to rules and precedents; so far as she had at all the value of the "composite" it was on her own lines altogether--the composition was of things that had lain nearest to hand. It mattered enormously for such a pair as the Bootts, intimately associated father and daughter, that what had lain nearest _their_ hand, or at least that of conspiring nature and fortune in preparing them for our consumption, had been the things of old Italy, of the inconceivable Tuscany, that of the but lately expropriated Grand Dukes in particular, and that when originally alighting among us _en plein_ Newport they had seemed fairly to reek with a saturation, esthetic, historic, romantic, that everything roundabout made precious. I was to apprehend in due course, and not without dismay, that what they really most reeked with was the delight of finding us ourselves exactly as we were; they fell so into the wondrous class of inverted romantics, several other odd flowers of which I was later on to have anxiously to deal with: we and our large crude scene of barbaric plenty, as it might have been called, beguiled them to appreciations such as made our tribute to themselves excite at moments their impatience and strike them as almost silly. It was _our_ conditions that were picturesque, and I had to make the best of a time when they themselves appeared to consent to remain so but by the beautiful gaiety of their preference. This, I remember well, I found disconcerting, so that my main affectionate business with them became, under amusement by the way, that of keeping them true to type. What above all contributed was that they really couldn't help their case, try as they would to shake off the old infection; they were of "old world" production through steps it was too late to retrace; and they were in the practical way and in the course of the very next years to plead as guilty to this as the highest proper standard for them could have prescribed. They "went back," and again and again, with a charming, smiling, pleading inconsequence--any pretext but the real one, the fact that the prime poison was in their veins, serving them at need; so that, as the case turned, all my own earlier sense, on the spot, of Florence and Rome was to mix itself with their delightfully rueful presence there. I could then perfectly put up with that flame of passion for Boston and Newport in them which still left so perfect their adaptability to Italian installations that would have been impossible save for subtle Italian reasons.

I speak of course but of the whole original view: time brings strange revenges and contradictions, and all the later history was to be a chapter by itself and of the fullest. We had been all alike accessible in the first instance to the call of those references which played through their walk and conversation with an effect that their qualifying ironies and amusing reactions, where such memories were concerned, couldn't in the least abate; for nothing in fact lent them a happier colour than just this ability to afford so carelessly to cheapen the certain treasure of their past. They had enough of that treasure to give it perpetually away--in our subsequently to be more determined, our present, sense; in short we had the fondest use for their leavings even when they themselves hadn't. Mary Temple, with her own fine quality so far from composite, rejoiced in the perception, however unassisted by any sort of experience, of what their background had "meant"; she would have liked to be able to know just that for herself, as I have already hinted, and I actually find her image most touching perhaps by its so speaking of what she with a peculiar naturalness dreamed of and missed. Of clear old English stock on her father's side, her sense for what was English in life--so we used to simplify--was an intimate part of her, little chance as it enjoyed for happy verifications. In the Bootts, despite their still ampler and more recently attested share in that racial strain, the foreign tradition had exceedingly damped the English, which didn't however in the least prevent her being caught up by it as it had stamped itself upon the admirable, the infinitely civilised and sympathetic, the markedly _produced_ Lizzie. This delightful girl, educated, cultivated, accomplished, toned above all, as from steeping in a rich old medium, to a degree of the rarest among her coevals "on our side," had the further, the supreme grace that she melted into American opportunities of friendship--and small blame to her, given such as she then met--with the glee of a sudden scarce believing discoverer. Tuscany could only swoon away under comparison of its starved sociabilities and complacent puerilities, the stress of which her previous years had so known, with the multiplied welcomes and freedoms, the exquisite and easy fellowships that glorified to her the home scene. Into not the least of these quick affinities had her prompt acquaintance with Mary Temple confidently ripened; and with no one in the aftertime, so long as that too escaped the waiting shears, was I to find it more a blest and sacred rite, guarded by no stiff approaches, to celebrate my cousin's memory. That really is my apology for this evocation--which might under straighter connections have let me in still deeper; since if I have glanced on another page of the present miscellany at the traps too often successfully set for my wandering feet my reader will doubtless here recognise a perfect illustration of our danger and will accuse me of treating an inch of canvas to an acre of embroidery. Let the poor canvas figure time and the embroidery figure consciousness--the proportion will perhaps then not strike us as so wrong. Consciousness accordingly still grips me to the point of a felt pressure of interest in such a matter as the recoverable history--history in the esthetic connection at least--of its insistent dealings with a given case. How in the course of time for instance was it not insistently to deal, for a purpose of application, with the fine prime image deposited all unwittingly by the "picturesque" (as I absolutely required to feel it) Boott situation or Boott _data_? The direct or vital value of these last, in so many ways, was experiential, a stored and assimilated thing; but the seed of suggestion proved after long years to have kept itself apart in order that it should develop under a particular breath. A not other than lonely and bereft American, addicted to the arts and endowed for them, housed to an effect of long expatriation in a massive old Florentine villa with a treasured and tended little daughter by his side, _that_ was the germ which for reasons beyond my sounding the case of Frank Boott had been appointed to plant deep down in my vision of things. So lodged it waited, but the special instance, as I say, had lodged it, and it lost no vitality--on the contrary it acquired every patience--by the fact that little by little each of its connections above ground, so to speak, was successively cut. Then at last after years it raised its own head into the air and found its full use for the imagination. An Italianate bereft American with a little moulded daughter in the setting of a massive old Tuscan residence was at the end of years exactly what was required by a situation of my own--conceived in the light of the Novel; and I _had_ it there, in the authenticated way, with its essential fund of truth, at once all the more because my admirable old friend had given it to me and none the less because he had no single note of character or temper, not a grain of the non-essential, in common with my Gilbert Osmond. This combination of facts has its shy interest, I think, in the general imaginative or reproductive connection--testifying as it so happens to do on that whole question of the "putting of people into books" as to which any ineptitude of judgment appears always in order. I probably shouldn't have had the Gilbert Osmonds at all without the early "form" of the Frank Bootts, but I still more certainly shouldn't have had them with the _sense_ of my old inspirers. The form had to be disembarrassed of that sense and to take in a thoroughly other; thanks to which account of the matter I am left feeling that I scarce know whether most to admire, for support of one's beautiful business of the picture of life, the relation of "people" to art or the relation of art to people. Adorable each time the mystery of which of these factors, as we say, has the more prevailingly conduced to a given effect--and too much adored, at any rate, I allow, when carrying me so very far away. I retrace my steps with this next.

I have made several attempts lately to write you a letter, but I
have given it up after two or three pages, because I have always
been in a blue state of mind at the time, and have each time
charitably decided before it was too late to spare you. But if I
were to wait until things change to rose-colour I might perhaps
wait till I die, or longer even, in which case your next
communication from me would be a spiritual one. I am going to
Newport in the early part of May to meet the Bootts--Henrietta has
just come back from there delighted with her visit; why, heaven
knows, I suppose, but I don't--except that she is in that blissful
state of babyhood peculiar to herself where everything seems
delightful.... I like George Eliot not through her poem so much,
not nearly so much, as through her prose. The creature interests me
personally, and I feel a desire to know something of her life; how
far her lofty moral sentiments have served her practically--for
instance in her dealings with Lewes. I see that she understands the
character of a _generous_ woman, that is of a woman who believes in
generosity and who must be that or nothing, and who feels keenly,
notwithstanding, how hard it is practically to follow this out, and
how (looking at it from the point of view of comfort as far as this
world goes) it "pays" not at all. We are having weather quite like
summer and rather depressing; I don't feel very well and am always
catching cold--that is I suppose I am, as I have a cough nearly all
the time. As for Phillips Brooks, what you say of him is, no doubt,
all true--he didn't touch the main point when I heard him, at all
events, and that satisfaction you so kindly wish me is, I am
afraid, not to be got from any man. The mystery of this world grows
and grows, and sticks out of every apparently trivial thing,
instead of lessening. I hope this feeling may not be the incipient
stage of insanity. Paul told the truth when he said that now we see
through a glass, _very_ darkly. I hope and trust that the rest may
be equally true, and that some day we shall see face to face. You
say it is easy to drown thought by well-doing, and is it not also
the soundest philosophy (so long of course as one doesn't humbug
oneself); since by simply thinking out a religion who has ever
arrived at anything that did not leave one's heart empty? Do you
ever see Willy James? Good-bye.