Dearest Fanny,—On Friday I called at your house and to my sorrow found the blinds all down. I had not supposed that you would leave so soon, though I might well have done so if I had reflected. It has been a sorrow to me to have seen so little of you lately, but so goes the train du monde. Collapsed condition, absences, interruptions of all sorts, have made the year end with most of the desiderata postponed to next year. I meant to write to you on Friday evening, then on Saturday morning. But I went to Lincoln on Saturday P.M. and stayed over the Emerson racket, without returning home, and have been packing and winding up affairs all day in order to get off to Chocorua tomorrow at 7.30. These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished life winds up.
I wish that you had been at Concord. It was the most harmoniously æsthetic or æsthetically harmonious thing! The weather, the beauty of the village, the charming old meeting-house, the descendants of the grand old man in such profusion, the mixture of Concord and Boston heads, so many of them of our own circle, the allusions to great thoughts and things, and the old-time New England rusticity and rurality, the silver polls and ancient voices of the vieille garde who did the orating (including this 'yer child), all made a matchless combination, took one back to one's childhood, and made that rarely realized marriage of reality with ideality, that usually only occurs in fiction or poetry.
It was a sweet and memorable day, and I am glad that I had an active share in it. I thank you for your sweet words to Alice about my address. I let R. W. E. speak for himself, and I find now, hearing so much from others of him, that there are only a few things that can be said of him; he was so squarely and simply himself as to impress every one in the same manner. Reading the whole of him over again continuously has made me feel his real greatness as I never did before. He's really a critter to be thankful for. Good-night, dear Fanny. I shall be back here by Commencement, and somehow we must see you at Chocorua this summer.
Love to your mother as well as to yourself, from your ever affectionate
WM. JAMES.
The letter of May 3rd drew from Henry James a long reply which may be found in the "Letters of Henry James," under date of May 24th; the reply, in its turn, elicited this response:—
To Henry James.
CHOCORUA, June 6, 1903.
Dearest Henry,—Your long and excitingly interesting type-written letter about coming hither arrived yesterday, and I hasten to retract all my dampening remarks, now that I understand the motives fully. The only ones I had imagined, blindling that I am, were fraternal piety and patriotic duty. Against those I thought I ought to proffer the thought of "eggs" and other shocks, so that when they came I might be able to say that you went not unwarned. But the moment it appears that what you crave is millions of just such shocks, and that a new lease of artistic life, with the lamp of genius fed by the oil of twentieth-century American life, is to be the end and aim of the voyage, all my stingy doubts wither and are replaced by enthusiasm that you are still so young-feeling, receptive and hungry for more raw material and experience. It cheers me immensely, and makes me feel more so myself. It is pathetic to hear you talk so about your career and its going to seed without the contact of new material; but feeling as you do about the new material, I augur a great revival of energy and internal effervescence from the execution of your project. Drop your English ideas and take America and Americans as they take themselves, and you will certainly experience a rejuvenation. This is all I have to say today—merely to let you see how the prospect exhilarates us.