II

My point at any rate, such as it is, would be that even at the age I had

reached in 1860 something of the happier time still lingered--the time

in which a given product of the press might have a situation and an

aspect, a considerability, so to speak, a circumscription and an _aura_;

room to breathe and to show in, margin for the casting of its nets. The

occasion at large was doubtless shrinking, one could note--shrinking

like the unlet "house" on a night of grandest opera, but "standing room

only" was not yet everywhere the sign, and the fine deliberate thing

could here and there find its seat. I really indeed might have held it

the golden age of letters still, and of their fond sister leisure, with

that quiet swim into our ken on its appointed day, during our Bonn

summer, of the charming Once a Week of the prime, the prime of George

Meredith and Charles Reade and J. E. Millais and George du Maurier;

which our father, to bridge our separation from him, sent us, from Paris

and elsewhere, in prompt and characteristic relief of our plotted, our

determined strict servitude to German, and to the embrace of the sweet

slim essence of which the strain of one's muscles round a circular ton

of advertisement was not a condition attached. I should like to say that

I rioted, all that season, on the supreme German classics _and_ on Evan

Harrington, with Charles Reade's A Good Fight, the assured little

prelude to The Cloister and the Hearth, thrown in; and I should indeed

be ready to say it, were not the expression gross for the really hushed

piety of my attitude during those weeks. It was perhaps not quite till

then that I fully emerged from the black shadow of the Ecole

Preparatoire aux Ecoles Speciales, not quite till we had got off beyond

the blest Rhine at Basle that I ceased to hear and feel all but just

behind me, portentous perhaps of another spring, the cold breath of the

monster. The guttery Bonn-Gasse was during those weeks of the year close

and stale, and the house of our good Herr Doctor Humpert, professor at

the Bonn Gymnasium, in which I shared a room with my brother Wilky,

contracted and dim, as well as fragrant through a range of assaults that

differed only in kind and not at all in number from those of the street

itself; and yet I held the period and the whole situation idyllic--the

slightly odd sense of which was one's being to that extent attuned to

the life of letters and of (oh the great thing!) impressions "gone in

for." To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one's impressions, to

feel them related and all harmoniously coloured, that _was_ positively

to face the aesthetic, the creative, even, quite wondrously, the critical

life and almost on the spot to commence author. They had begun, the

impressions--that was what was the matter with them--to scratch quite

audibly at the door of liberation, of extension, of projection; what

they were _of_ one more or less knew, but what they were _for_ was the

question that began to stir, though one was still to be a long time at a

loss directly to answer it.

There, for the present, was the rub, the dark difficulty at which one

could but secretly stare--secretly because one was somehow ashamed of

its being there and would have quickly removed one's eyes, or tried to

clear them, if caught in the act of watching. Impressions were not

merely all right but were the dearest things in the world; only one

would have gone to the stake rather than in the first place confessed to

some of them, or in the second announced that one really lived by them

and built on them. This failure then to take one's stand in the

connection could but come from the troubled view that they were naught

without a backing, a stout stiff hard-grained underside that would hold

them together and of which the terrible name was simply science,

otherwise learning, and learning exclusively by books, which were at

once the most beautiful and the most dreadful things in the world, some

of them right, strikingly, showily right, some of them disgracefully and

almost unmentionably wrong, that is grossly irrelevant, as for instance

a bound volume of Once a Week would be, but remarkable above all for

overwhelming number and in general for defiance of comprehension. It was

true that one had from time to time the rare adventure of one's surprise

at understanding parts of them none the less--understanding more than a

very little, more than much too little; but there was no practical

support to speak of in that, even the most one could ever hope to

understand being a mere drop in the bucket. Never did I quite strike it

off, I think, that impressions might themselves _be_ science--and this

probably because I didn't then know them, when it came to the point, as

anything but life. I knew them but by that collective and

unpractical--many persons would have said that frivolous--name; which

saw me little further. I was under the impression--this in fact the very

liveliest of what might have been called the lot--that life and

knowledge were simply mutual opposites, one inconsistent with the other;

though hovered about, together, at the same time, by the anomaly that

when knowledge impinged upon life, pushed against her, as it were, and

drove her to the wall, it was all right, and such was knowledge's way

and title; whereas when life played the like tricks with knowledge

nothing but shame for the ruder, even if lighter, party could accrue.

There was to come to me of course in time the due perception that

neither was of the least use--use to myself--without the other; but

meanwhile, and even for much after, the extreme embarrassment continued:

to whichever of the opposites one gave one's self it was with a sense of

all but basely sacrificing the other. However, the conflict and the

drama involved in the question at large was doubtless what was to make

consciousness--under whichever of the two names one preferred to

entertain it--supremely intense and interesting.

This then is by way of saying that the idyll, as I have called it, of

the happy juncture I glanced at a moment back came from the fact that I

didn't at all know how much I was living, and meanwhile quite supposed I

was considerably learning. When, rising at some extraordinary hour of

the morning, I went forth through the unawakened town (and the Germans,

at that time, heaven knows, were early afoot too), and made for the open

country and the hill, in particular, of the neighbouring Venusberg,

long, low and bosky, where the dews were still fresh and ancient mummies

of an old cloister, as I remember it, somewhere perched and exposed, I

was doing, to my sense, an attuned thing; attuned, that is, to my

coming home to bend double over Schiller's Thirty Years' War in the

strenuous spirit that would keep me at it, or that would vary it with

Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, till late in the warm afternoon. I found

German prose much tougher than the verse, and thereby more opposed to

"life," as to which I of course couldn't really shake off the sense that

it might be worked as infinitely comprehensive, comprehensive even of

the finest discriminations against it. The felicity, present but

naturally unanalysed, was that the whole thing, our current episode,

_was_ exactly comprehensive of life, presenting it in particular as

characteristically German, and therein freshly vivid--with the great

vividness that, by our parents' vague wish, we were all three after or

out for; in spite of our comparatively restricted use, in those days, of

these verbal graces. Such therefore was the bright unity of our

experience, or at least of my own share in it--this luck that, through

the intensity of my wanting it to, all consciousness, all my own

immediate, _tasted_ German, to the great and delightful quickening of my

imagination. The quickening was of course no such matter as I was to

know nearly ten years later on plunging for the first time over the Alps

into Italy; but, letting alone that I was then so much older, I had

wondered about Italy, to put it embracingly, far more than I was

constitutionally capable of wondering about Germany. It was enough for

me at Bonn that I felt no lack of appetite--had for the time all the

illusion of being on the way to something; to something, I mean, with

which the taste of German might somehow _directly_ mix itself. Every

aspect and object round about was a part, at all events, of the actual

mixture; and when on drowsy afternoons, not a little interspaced indeed,

I attempted the articulate perusal of Hermann und Dorothea with our good

Professor, it was like dreaming, to the hum of bees, if not to the

aftertaste of "good old Rhenish," in some homely fruity

eighteenth-century garden.

The good old Rhenish is no such false note in this reconstitution; I

seem to see the Frau Doctorin and her ancient mildly-scowling sister

Fraeulein Stamm, who reminded me of Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the

Seven Gables, perpetually wiping green hock-glasses and holding them up

to our meagre light, as well as setting out long-necked bottles, with

rather chalky cakes, in that forward section of our general

eating-and-living-room which formed our precinct of reception and

conversation. The unbroken space was lighted at either end, from street

and court, and its various effects of tempered shade or, frankly

speaking, of rather greasy gloom, amid which the light touch of

elegance gleamed but from the polish of the glasses and the sloping

shoulders of their bottle, comes back to me as the view of an intensely

internal interior. I recall how oppressively in that apartment, how

congestedly, as in some cage of which the wires had been papered over, I

felt housed and disconnected; I scarce then, I think, knew what the

matter was, but it could only have been that in all those summer weeks,

to the best of my belief, no window was ever once opened. Still, there

was the scene, the thick, the much-mixed chiaroscuro through which the

two ladies of the family emerged from an exiguous retreat just off the

back end of the place with ample platters of food; the almost

impenetrable dusk of the middle zone, where the four or five of us,

seated with our nutcracker-faced pastor, conveyed the food to our mouths

with a confidence mainly borrowed from the play of his own deep-plunging

knife; and then the forward, the festal extension, the privilege of

occasionally lingering in which, or of returning to it for renewed

refreshment, was a recognition both of our general minding of our

business upstairs--left as we were to thumb our Fluegel's Dictionary by

the hour so long as we invoked no other oracle. Our drowsy Doctor

invited no such approach; he smiled upon us as if unseen forefingers of

great force had been inserted for the widening of his mouth at the

corners, and I had the sense of his not quite knowing what to make of

our being so very gently barbaric, or rather so informally civilised; he

safely housed and quite rankly fed us, guided us to country walks and to

the swimming-baths by the Rhine-side, introduced us to fruit-gardens

where, on payment of the scantest tribute, we were suffered to consume

off-hand bushels of cherries, plums and pears; suffered us to ascend the

Drachenfels and to partake of coffee at Rolandseck and in other friendly

open-air situations; but flung his gothic shadow as little as possible

over my so passive page at least, and took our rate of acquisition

savingly for granted.

This, in the optimism of the hour, I have no memory of resenting; the

page, though slow, managed at the same time to be stirring, and I asked

no more of any one or anything but that they should be with all due

gothicism whatever they most easily might. The long vistas of the

beeches and poplars on the other side of the Rhine, after we had crossed

by the funicular ferry, gothically rustled and murmured: I fancied their

saying perpetually "We are German woods, we are German woods--which

makes us very wonderful, do you know? and unlike any others: don't you

feel the spell of the very sound of us and of the beautiful words, 'Old

German woods, old German woods,' even if you can't tell why?" I

couldn't altogether tell why, but took everything on trust as mystically

and valuably gothic--valuably because ministering with peculiar

directness, as I gathered, to culture. I was in, or again I was "out,"

in my small way, for culture; which seemed quite to come, come from

everywhere at once, with the most absurd conciliatory rush, pitifully

small as would have been any list of the sources I tapped. The beauty

was in truth that everything was a source, giving me, by the charmingest

breach of logic, more than it at all appeared to hold; which was exactly

what had not been the case at the Institution Rochette, where things had

appeared, or at least had pretended, to hold so much more than they

gave. The oddity was that about us now everything--everything but the

murmur of the German woods and the great flow and magic name of the

Rhine--was more ugly than beautiful, tended in fact to say at every

turn: "You shall suffer, yes, indeed you _are_ doing so (stick up for

your right to!) in your sense of form; which however is quite compatible

with culture, is really one of the finest parts of it, and may decidedly

prove to you that you're getting it." I hadn't, in rubbing, with

whatever weakness, against French and, so far as might be, against

France, and in sinking, very sensibly, more and more into them,

particularly felt that I was getting it _as_ such; what I was getting

as such was decidedly rather my famous "life," and without so much as

thinking of the degree, with it all, of the valuable and the helpful.

Life meanwhile I had a good deal of at my side in the person of my

brother Wilky, who, as I have had occasion elsewhere to say, contrived

in those years to live, or to have every appearance of so doing, with an

immediacy that left me far in the lurch. I was always still wondering

how, while he had solved the question simply _ambulando_, which was for

him but by the merest sociable stroll. This represented to me

success--success of a kind, but such an assured kind--in a degree that

was my despair; and I have never forgotten how, that summer, when the

Herr Doctor did look in, did settle down a little to have the bristling

page out with us, Wilky's share of the hour took on the spot the form of

his turning at once upon our visitor the tables of earnest inquiry. He

delighted, after this tribute of eagerness, to meet the Doctor's

interrogative advance; but the communication so made was of anything and

everything except the fruit of his reading (the act of reading was

inhuman and repugnant to him), and I amazedly noted while I nursed my

small hoard that anything he offered did in the event quite as well: he

could talk with such charm, such drollery of candour, such

unexpectedness of figure, about what he had done and what he hadn't--or

talk at least before it, behind it and beside it. We had three or four

house-companions, youths from other places attending the Gymnasium and

committed to our Professor's care, as to whom I could somehow but infer

that they were, each in his personal way, inordinately gothic--which

they had to be to supply to my mind a relation, or a substitute for a

relation, with them; whereas my younger brother, without a scrap of a

view of them, a grain of theory or formula, tumbled straight into their

confidence all round. Our air for _him_ was by just so much life as it

couldn't have dreamed of being culture, and he was so far right that

when the son of the house and its only child, the slim and ardent

Theodor, who figured to me but as a case of such classic sensibility, of

the Lieder or the Werther sort, as might have made, with the toss of a

yellow lock or the gleam of a green blouse, the image for an Uhland or a

Heine stanza, had imparted to him an intention of instant suicide under

some resentment of parental misconception, he had been able to use

dissuasion, or otherwise the instinct of then most freely fraternising,

with a success to which my relish for so romantic a stroke as charmingly

in Theodor's character and setting mightn't at all have attained. There

is a small something of each of us in a passage of an ingenuous letter

addressed by him from the midst of these conditions to his parents. I

fondly catch, I confess, at any of these recoverable lights; finding

them at the best too scant for my commemorative purpose.

Willy got his photograph this morning after three hours' hard work.

From the post-office he was sent to the custom-house, and there was

obliged to sign his name and to go to some neighbouring bookstore

to buy a seal. On returning to the custom-house he was sent back to

the post-office to get some document or other. After obtaining this

article he turned his steps once more to the custom-house, where an

insolent officer told him he must wait an hour. W. informed him

that he would return at the end of the hour, and accordingly for

the third time went to the C.H., and was conducted by the clerk to

a cellar where the packages were kept, and there told to take off

his hat. He obeyed, raging, and then was a fourth time sent to the

P.O.--this time to pay money. Happily he is now in possession of

his property. H. and he took a walk this afternoon to a

fruit-garden, where plums, cherries, gooseberries and currants were

abundant. After half an hour's good work H. left W. finishing

merely the plums--the cherry and gooseberry course to come later.

He was so enchanted that he thought H. a great fool to leave so

soon. How does Paris now strike you? It can't be as nice as Bonn.

You had better write to Bob.

Bob, our youngest brother, had been left at Geneva with excellent M.

Maquelin and was at that time _en course_, over the Alps, with this

gentleman and their young companions; a most desirable, delicious

excursion, which I remember following in envious fancy, as it included a

descent to the Italian Lakes and a push on as far as Genoa. In reference

to which excursion I cull a line or two from a faded scrap of a letter

addressed a little later by this youngest of us to his "Beloved Brother"

William. "This is about our Grande Course. We started at 5 o'clock in

the morning with our faces and hands all nicely washed and our nails

clean. The morning was superb, and as we waited in the court the soft

balmy air of the mountains came in bringing with it the melodious sound

of the rappel for breakfast. This finished we bade adieu, and I could

see the emotions of the kind and ever-watchful Madame Maquelin as a few

silent drops trickled down her fair cheeks. We at last arrived at the

boat, where we met Mr. Peters, a portly gentleman from the city of

Philadelphia, with his two sweet sons, one twelve, the other seven years

old, the eldest coming from Mr. E.'s school with no very good opinion of

the principal--saying he had seen him in a state of tightness several

times during his stay there." Mr. Peters appears to have been something

of a pessimist, for, when at a later stage "it began to rain hard, and

half the road was a foot deep in water, and the cocher had stopped

somewhere to get lanterns and had at the same time indulged in certain

potations which didn't make him drive any the straighter," this

gentleman "insinuated that we had all better have been with our

mothers." The letter records at some length the early phases of the

affair, but under the weight of the vision of Italy it rather breaks

down and artlessly simplifies. "Genoa is a most lively town, and there

is a continual swarm of sailors in the street. We visited several

palaces, among others that of Victor Emanuel, which is very fine, and

the fruit is very cheap. We stayed there several days, but at last

started for Turin, where we spent a Sunday--a place I didn't much like,

I suppose because of that reason. We left Turin the next day on foot,

but lost our road and had to come back." I recover even in presence of

these light accents my shade of wonder at this odd chance that made the

least developed of us the subject of what seemed to me even then a

privilege of the highest intensity; and there again keeps it company my

sense, through all the after years, that this early glimpse of the blest

old Italy, almost too early though it appears to have but just missed

being, might have done something towards preparing or enriching for Bob

the one little plot of consciousness in which his deeply troubled life

was to find rest. He was in the event also fondly to aim at painting,

like two of his brothers; but whereas they were to fumble with the

lock, in their very differing degree, only in those young years, he was

to keep at it most as he grew older, though always with a perfect

intelligence of the inevitable limits of the relation, the same

intelligence that was so sharp and sad, so extraordinarily free and fine

and detached in fact, as play of mind, play of independent talk and of

pen, for the limits of his relation to many other matters. Singularly

intelligent all round, yet with faculties that had early declined any

consummation of acquaintance with such training as under a different

sort of pressure he might have enjoyed, he had an admirable hand and

eye, and I have known no other such capacity for absorbing or storing up

the minutest truths and shades of landscape fact and giving them out

afterward, in separation from the scene, with full assurance and

felicity. He could do this still better even than he cared to do; I for

my part cared much more that he should than he ever did himself, and

then it was, I dare say, that I made the reflection: "He took in the

picture of Italy, with his firm hard gift, having the chance while

William and I were still, comparatively, small untouched and gaping

barbarians; and it should always be in him to do at some odd fine moment

a certain honour to that." I held to it that that sensibility had played

in him more than by any outward measure at the time; which was perhaps

indeed one of the signs within me of the wasteful habit or trick of a

greater feeling for people's potential propriety or felicity or full

expression than they seemed able to have themselves. At all events I was

absolutely never to cease to remember for Bob, through everything--and

there was much and of the most agitated and agitating--that he had been

dipped as a boy into the sacred stream; to some effect which, thanks to

two or three of his most saving and often so amusing sensibilities, the

turbid sea of his life might never quite wash away.

William had meanwhile come to Bonn with us, but was domiciled with

another tutor, younger and fairer and more of the world, above all more

ventilated and ventilating, Herr Stromberg, whose defect might in fact

have seemed that, with his constant exhibition of the stamp received by

him from the writings of Lord Macaulay, passages of which he could

recite by heart, and the circumstance that his other pupil, William's

comrade for a time, was of unmitigatedly English, that is of

quasi-Byronic association, he didn't quite rise to the full gothic

standard. Otherwise indeed our brother moved on the higher plane of

light and air and ease, and above all of enjoyed society, that we felt

he naturally must. Present to me yet is the thrill of learning from him

that his English fellow-pupil was the grandson, if I remember rightly

the degree of descent, of Mary Chaworth, Byron's "first love," and my

sense afterwards, in gaping at young Mr. Musters himself, that this

independently romantic contact would have been more to my own private

purpose at least than the most emphasised gothicism. None the less do I

regain it as a part of my current vision that Frau Stromberg, who was

young and fair, wrote tragedies as well as made pancakes--which were

served to each consumer double, a thick confiture within being the

reason of this luxuriance, and being also a note beyond our experience

in the Bonn-Gasse; and that with the printed five acts of a certain

"Cleopatra" before me, read aloud in the first instance to her young

inmates and by my brother passed on to me, I lost myself in the view of

I scarce knew what old-world Germanic grace, positively, or little

court-city practice of the theatre: these things so lived in the small

thick pamphlet, "grey paper with blunt type" and bristling, to my

discomfiture, with descriptive stage directions, vast dense bracketed

tracts, gothic enough in all conscience, as to which I could already

begin to wonder whether such reinforcements of presentation proved more

for or against the true expressional essence of the matter; for or

against, that is, there being nothing at all so dramatic, so chargeable

with meaning and picture, as speech, of whatever sort, made perfect.

Such speculations, I may parenthesise, might well have been fostered,

and doubtless were, by an impression that I find commemorated in a few

lines of a letter of my father's to a friend in America--he having

brought us on to Bonn, introduced us to our respective caretakers and

remained long enough to have had an evening at the theatre, to which we

accompanied him. "We had Ristori to play Mary Stuart for us last

night--which was the vulture counterfeiting Jenny Wren. Every little

while the hoarse exulting voice, the sanguinary beak, the lurid leer of

menace, and the relentless talons looked forth from the feathery mass

and sickened you with disgust. She would do Elizabeth better." I recall

the performance in every feature, as well as my absence of such

reserves, though quite also the point to which I was impressed by the

utterance of them; not that it didn't leave me at the same time free to

feel that the heroine of history represented could scarce have been at

all a dove-like, much less a wren-like person. She had indeed on Madame

Ristori's showing prodigious resources of militant mobility--of what in

fact would be called to-day mobilisation. Several years later on I was

to see the actress play the same part in America; and then, if I am not

mistaken, was to note scarce more than one point; the awful effect on

_any_ histrionic case, even on one so guardedly artful as hers, of

having been dragged round the globe and forced home, so far as might be,

to imperfect comprehensions. The big brush had come fairly to daub the

canvas. Let the above, however, serve in particular to lead in as many

examples of my father's singularly striking and personal habit of

expression and weight of thought as these pages may find room for.

The one difficulty is that to open that general door into the limbo of

old letters, charged with their exquisite ghostly appeal, is almost to

sink into depths of concession. I yield here for instance to the claim

of a page or two from William, just contemporary and addressed to our

parents in Paris--and yield perhaps but for no better reason than that

of the small historic value or recoverable charm that I am moved to find

in its illustrative items. The reference of its later lines is to a

contemporary cousin, young and blooming, by whom I have already ever so

lightly brushed[2] and who figured quite with the grand air on our young

horizon; the only daughter of the brightest of the Albany uncles (by

that time lost and mourned) now on the tour of Europe with a pair of

protective elders for her entrance upon life and at that hour

surrounding our parents, her uncle and aunt, with a notably voluminous

rustle of fresh Paris clothes, the far-spreading drapery of the more and

more draped and flounced and "sloped" second Empire. This friendly

frou-frou almost reached our ears, so sociable for us was every sound of

her, in our far-off Rhineland. She was with her stature and shape the

finest possible person to carry clothes, and I thought of her, with a

revival of the old yearning envy, as now quite transcendently orphaned

and bereft, dowered, directed and equipped.

Your hearts, I know, would have been melted if you had had a view

of us this Sunday morning. I went directly after breakfast for the

boys, and though H. had an "iron stomach-ache," as he called it, we

went off together to that low wooded hill which the Aunt could see

from her window when you were here, and walked about till

dinner-time, H. being all the while in great pain. In one part we

found a platform with a stone bench commanding a view of the whole

valley, and, as we were rather tired, sat down on it, H. and Wilky

each with a Once a Week, while I tried to draw the view in my

pocket-book. We wondered what our beloved parents were doing at

that moment, 11.30, and thought you must all have been in your

salon, Alice at the window with her eyes fixed on her novel, but

eating some rich fruit that Father has just brought in for her from

the Palais Royal, and the lovely Mother and Aunt in armchairs,

their hands crossed in front of them, listening to Father, who

walks up and down talking of the superiority of America to these

countries after all, and how much better it is we should have done

with them. We wished, oh we wished we could have been with you to

join in the conversation and partake of the fruit. We got up from

the seat and went on with a heavy sigh, but in a way so fraternal,

presenting such a sweet picture of brotherly unitedness and

affection, that it would have done you good to see us.

And so it is every day that we meet for our shorter walks and

talks. The German gets on slowly, but I notice a very marked

improvement in talking. I have not kept at it so hard this last

week as before, and I prevent H. from working his eyes out, which

he seems on the whole rather less inclined to do. I am going to

read as much as I can the rest of the time we are here. It seems a

mere process of soaking, requiring no mental effort, but only time

and steady patience. My room is very comfortable now I've got used

to it, and I have a pair of slippers of green plush heavy and

strong enough to last all my life and then be worn by my children.

The photograph of our Zoffingen group has come, which gives me a

moustache big enough for three lifeguardsmen. Tell us something

more about Mary Helen. How long does she expect to stay in Europe,

and who is this Dr. Adams--the man she is engaged to? She directs

me to write to her in his care--so that I wish you would ask her,

as she says she hopes to meet me, whether I shall still address her

as Miss James? Of course it would be painful, but I think I could

do it if Adams weren't there. Let the delicious little grey-eyed

Alice be locked up alone on the day after the receipt of this with

paper and envelopes to write a letter unassisted, uncorrected and

unpunctuated to her loving brothers, who would send her novels and

peaches if they could. What a blessing it is to have such parents,

such a perfect Mother and magnificent Father and dear good Aunt and

splendid little Sister!

I may mention that Mary Helen was not "engaged" to the gentleman

above-mentioned, and was eventually to marry the late Alfred Grymes,

originally of Louisiana. Also that a letter subsequent to this,

apparently of the first days in September, sounds to his father the

first note of my brother's definite personal preference, as he seemed

lately and increasingly, though not in conditions markedly propitious,

to have become aware of it, for an adoption of the "artistic career." It

was an odd enough circumstance, in respect to the attested blood in our

veins, that no less than three of our father's children, with two of his

grandsons to add to these, and with a collateral addendum representing

seven, in all, of our grandfather's, William James's, descendants in

three generations, should have found the artistic career in general and

the painter's trade in particular irresistibly solicit them.

I wish you would as you promised set down as clearly as you can on

paper what your idea of the nature of Art _is_, because I do not,

probably, understand it fully, and should like to have it presented

in a form that I might think over at my leisure. I wish you would

do so as fully as you conveniently can, so that I may ruminate

it--and I won't say more about it till I have heard from you again.

As for what your last letter did contain, what can I do but thank

you for every word of it and assure you that they went to the right

spot. Having such a Father with us, how can we be other than in

some measure worthy of him?--if not perhaps as eminently so as the

distance leads his fond heart to imagine. I never value him so much

as when I am away from him. At home I see only his striking

defects, but here he seems all perfection, and I wonder as I write

why I didn't cherish him more when he was beside me. I beg darling

old Mother's forgiveness too for the rude and dastardly way in

which I snub her, and the Aunt for the impatience and violence I

have always shown her. I shall be a perfect sherry-cobbler to both

of them, and to the small Alice too, young as she may be for such

treats.

I have just got home from dining with the boys and their Humperts;

where I found the Doctor as genial as ever and the two old ladies

perfect characters for Dickens. They have been so shut out from the

world and melting together so long by the kitchen fire that the

minds of both have become fused into one, and then seem to

constitute a sort of two-bodied individual. I never saw anything

more curious than the way they sit mumbling together at the end of

the table, each using simultaneously the same comment if anything

said at our end strikes their ear. H. pegs away pretty stoutly, but

I don't think you need worry about him. He and Wilky appear to get

on in great harmony and enliven themselves occasionally by

brotherly trials of strength, quite good-natured, in their room,

when excess of labour has made them sleepy or heavy. In these

sometimes one, sometimes the other is victorious. They often pay me

a visit here while I am dressing, which of course is highly

convenient--and I have more than once been with _them_ early enough

to be present at Wilky's tumble out of bed and consequent

awakening, with the call on the already-at-work H.: "Why the

mischief didn't you stop me?" Wilky and I walked to Rolandseck

yesterday afternoon, and after a furious race back to the station

found ourselves too late for the train by a second. So we took a

boat and rowed down here, which was delightful. We are going to put

H. through a splashing good walk daily. A thousand thanks to the

cherry-lipped, apricot-nosed, double-chinned little Sister for her

strongly dashed-off letter, which inflamed the hearts of her lonely

brothers with an intense longing to smack her celestial cheeks.