I wish I could have been with you at Munich and heard the deep-lunged Germans roar at each other. I care not for the matters uttered, if I only could hear the voice. I hope you met [Henry] Sidgwick there. I sent him the American Hallucination-Census results, after considerable toil over them, but S. never acknowledges or answers anything, so I'll have to wait to hear from someone else whether he "got them off." I have had a somewhat unwholesome summer. Much lecturing to teachers and sitting up to talk with strangers. But it is instructive and makes one patriotic, and in six days I shall have finished the Chicago lectures, which begin tomorrow, and get straight to Keene Valley for the rest of September. My conditions just now are materially splendid, as I am the guest of a charming elderly lady, Mrs. Wilmarth, here at her country house, and in town at the finest hotel of the place. The political campaign is a bully one. Everyone outdoing himself in sweet reasonableness and persuasive argument—hardly an undignified note anywhere. It shows the deepening and elevating influence of a big topic of debate. It is difficult to doubt of a people part of whose life such an experience is. But imagine the country being saved by a McKinley! If only Reed had been the candidate! There have been some really splendid speeches and documents....
Ever thine,
W. J.
To Henry James.
Burlington, Vt., Sept. 28, 1896.
Dear Henry,—The summer is over! alas! alas! I left Keene Valley this A.M. where I have had three life-and-health-giving weeks in the forest and the mountain air, crossed Lake Champlain in the steamer, not a cloud in the sky, and sleep here tonight, meaning to take the train for Boston in the A.M. and read Kant's Life all day, so as to be able to lecture on it when I first meet my class. School begins on Thursday—this being Monday night. It has been a rather cultivating summer for me, and an active one, of which the best impression (after that of the Adirondack woods, or even before it) was that of the greatness of Chicago. It needs a Victor Hugo to celebrate it. But as you won't appreciate it without demonstration, and I can't give the demonstration (at least not now and on paper), I will say no more on that score! Alice came up for a week, but went down and through last night. She brought me up your letter of I don't remember now what date (after your return to London, about Wendell Holmes, Baldwin and Royalty, etc.) which was very delightful and for which I thank. But don't take your epistolary duties hard! Letter-writing becomes to me more and more of an affliction, I get so many business letters now. At Chicago, I tried a stenographer and type-writer with an alleviation that seemed almost miraculous. I think that I shall have to go in for one some hours a week in Cambridge. It just goes "whiff" and six or eight long letters are done, so far as you're concerned. I hear great reports of your "old things," and await the book. My great literary impression this summer has been Tolstoy. On the whole his atmosphere absorbs me into it as no one's else has ever done, and even his religious and melancholy stuff, his insanity, is probably more significant than the sanity of men who haven't been through that phase at all.
But I am forgetting to tell you (strange to say, since it has hung over me like a cloud ever since it happened) of dear old Professor Child's death. We shall never see his curly head and thickset figure more. He had aged greatly in the past three years, since being thrown out of a carriage, and went to the hospital in July to be treated surgically. He never recovered and died in three weeks, after much suffering, his family not being called down from the country till the last days. He had a moral delicacy and a richness of heart that I never saw and never expect to see equaled. [10a] The children bear it well, but I fear it will be a bad blow for dear Mrs. Child. She and Alice, I am glad to say, are great friends.... Good-night. Leb' wohl!
W. J.