To this word about enjoying the aspects of nature may be added a few lines from a letter to his son William, which James wrote from Europe in 1900:—
"Scenery seems to wear in one's consciousness better than any other element in life. In this year of much solemn and idle meditation, I have often been surprised to find what a predominant part in my own spiritual experience it has played, and how it stands out as almost the only thing the memory of which I should like to carry over with me beyond the veil, unamended and unaltered. From the midst of every thing else, almost, surgit amari aliquid; but from the days in the open air, never any bitter whiff, save that they are gone forever."
To Miss Frances R. Morse.
Stonehurst,
Intervale, N. H., Sept. 18, 1902.
Dearest Fanny,—How long it is since we have exchanged salutations and reported progress! Happy the country which is without a history! I have had no history to communicate, and I hope that you have had none either, and that the summer has glided away as happily for you as it has for us. Now it begins to fade towards the horizon over which so many ancient summers have slipped, and our household is on the point of "breaking up" just when the season invites one most imperiously to stay. Dang all schools and colleges, say I. Alice goes down tomorrow (I being up here with the Merrimans only for one day) to start Billy for Europe—he will spend the winter at Geneva University—and to get "the house" ready for our general reception on the 26th. I may possibly make out to stay up here till the Monday following, and spend the interval of a few days by myself among the mountains, having stuck to the domestic hearth unusually tight all summer....
We have had guests—too many of them, rather, at one time, for me—and a little reading has been done, mostly philosophical technics, which, by the strange curse laid upon Adam, certain of his descendants have been doomed to invent and others, still more damned, to learn. But I've also read Stevenson's letters, which everybody ought to read just to know how charming a human being can be, and I've read a good part of Goethe's Gedichte once again, which are also to be read, so that one may realize how absolutely healthy an organization may every now and then eventuate into this world. To have such a lyrical gift and to treat it with so little solemnity, so that most of the output consists of mere escape of the over-tension into bits of occasional verse, irresponsible, unchained, like smoke-wreaths!—it du give one a great impression of personal power. In general, though I'm a traitor for saying so, it seems to me that the German race has been a more massive organ of expression for the travail of the Almighty than the Anglo-Saxon, though we did seem to have something more like it in Elizabethan times. Or are clearness and dapperness the absolutely final shape of creation? Good-bye! dear Fanny—you see how mouldy I am temporarily become. The moment I take my pen, I can write in no other way. Write thou, and let me know that things are greener and more vernal where you are. Alice would send much love to you, were she here. Give mine to your mother, brother, and sister-in-law, and all. Your loving,
W. J.
To Henry L. Higginson.
Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 1, 1902.
Dear Henry,—I am emboldened to the step I am taking by the consciousness that though we are both at least sixty years old and have known each other from the cradle, I have never but once (or possibly twice) traded on your well-known lavishness of disposition to swell any "subscription" which I was trying to raise.