Late in April came a letter from Henry James in which he spoke, as if with many misgivings, of returning to America for a six months' visit. "I should wish," he said, "to write a book of 'impressions' and to that end get quite away from Boston and New York—really see the country at large. On the other hand I don't see myself prowling alone in Western cities and hotels or finding my way about by myself, and it is all darksome and tangled. Some light may break—but meanwhile next Wednesday (awful fact) is my 60th birthday." He had not been in America for more than twenty years, and had never known anything of the country outside of New England and New York.

To Henry James.

CAMBRIDGE, May 3, 1903.

...Your long and inhaltsvoll letter of April 10th arrived duly, and constituted, as usual, an "event." Theodora had already given us your message of an intended visit to these shores; and your letter made Alice positively overflow with joyous anticipations. On my part they are less unmixed, for I feel more keenly a good many of the désagréments to which you will inevitably be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you. It takes a long time to notice such things no longer. One thing, for example, which would reconcile me most easily to abandoning my native country forever would be the certainty of immunity, when traveling, from the sight of my fellow beings at hotels and dining-cars having their boiled eggs brought to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter. How irrational this dislike is, is proved both by logic, and by the pleasure taken in the custom by the élite of mankind over here.... Yet of such irrational sympathies and aversions (quite conventional for the most part) does our pleasure in a country depend, and in your case far more than in that of most men. The vocalization of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful that the process of hardening oneself thereto is very slow, and would in your case be impossible. It is simply incredibly loathsome. I should hate to have you come and, as a result, feel that you had now done with America forever, even in an ideal and imaginative sense, which after a fashion you can still indulge in. As far as your copyright interests go, couldn't they be even more effectually and just as cheaply or more cheaply attended to by your [engaging an agent] over here. Alice foresees Lowell [Institute] lectures; but lectures have such an awful side (when not academic) that I myself have foresworn them—it is a sort of prostitution of one's person. This is rather a throwing of cold water; but it is well to realize both sides, and I think I can realize certain things for you better than the sanguine and hospitable Alice does.

Now for the other side, there are things in the American out-of-door nature, as well as comforts indoors that can't be beat, and from which I get an infinite pleasure. If you avoided the banalité of the Eastern cities, and traveled far and wide, to the South, the Colorado, over the Canadian Pacific to that coast, possibly to the Hawaiian Islands, etc., you would get some reward, at the expense, it is true, of a considerable amount of cash. I think you ought to come in March or April and stay till the end of October or into November. The hot summer months you could pass in an absolutely quiet way—if you wished to—at Chocorua with us, where you could do as much writing as you liked, continuous, and undisturbed, and would (I am sure) grow fond of, as you grew more and more intimate with, the sweet rough country there. After June, 1904, I shall be free, to go and come as I like, for I have fully decided to resign, and nothing would please me so well (if I found then that I could afford it) as to do some of that proposed traveling along with you. I could take you into certain places that perhaps you wouldn't see alone. Don't come therefore, if you do come, before the spring of 1904!

I have been doing nothing in the way of work of late, and consequently have kept my fatigue somewhat at bay. The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all found to be most propitious, seems to me a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster. I see now with absolute clearness, that greatly as I have been helped and enlarged by my University business hitherto, the time has come when the remnant of my life must be passed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has received from the Universe. This I mean to stick to, and am only sorry that I am obliged to stay in the University one other year. It is giving up the inessentials which have grown beyond one's powers, for the sake of the duties which, after all, are most essentially imposed on one by the nature of one's powers.

Emerson is exquisite! I think I told you that I have to hold forth in praise of him at Concord on the 25th—in company with Senator Hoar, T. W. Higginson, and Charles Norton—quite a vieille garde, to which I now seem to belong. You too have been leading an Emersonian life—though the environment differs to suit the needs of the different psychophysical organism which you present.

I have but little other news to tell you. Charles Peirce is lecturing here—queer being.... Boott is in good spirits, and as sociable as ever. Grace Norton ditto. I breakfasted this Sunday morning, as of yore, with Theodora [Sedgwick], who had a bad voyage in length but not in quality, though she lay in her berth the whole time. I can hardly conceive of being willing to travel under such conditions. Otherwise we are well enough, except Peggy, whose poor condition I imagine to result from influenza. Aleck has been regenerated through and through by "bird lore," happy as the day is long, and growing acquainted with the country all about Boston. All in consequence of a neighboring boy on the street, 14 years old and an ornithological genius, having taken him under his protection. Yesterday, all day long in the open air, from seven to seven, at Wayland, spying and listening to birds, counting them, and writing down their names!

I shall go off tomorrow or next day to the country again, by myself, joining Henry Higginson and a colleague at the end of the week, and returning by the 14th for Ph.D. examinations which I hate profoundly. H. H. has bought some five miles of the shore of Lake Champlain adjoining his own place there, and thinks of handing it over to the University for the surveying, engineering, forestry and mining school. He is as liberal-hearted a man as the Lord ever walloped entrails into....