Chapter V (1)

Nothing meanwhile could have been less logical, yet at the same time more natural, than that William's interest in the practice of painting should have suddenly and abruptly ceased; a turn of our affair attended, however, with no shade of commotion, no repining at proved waste; with as little of any confessed ruefulness of mistake on one side as of any elation of wisdom, any resonance of the ready "I told you so" on the other. The one side would have been, with a different tone about the matter and a different domestic habit than ours, that of my brother's awkwardness, accompanying whatever intelligence, of disavowal, and the other been our father's not unemphatic return to the point that his doubts, those originally and confidently intimated, had been justified by the fact. Tempting doubtless in a heavier household air the opportunity on the latter's part to recall that if he had perfectly recognised his son's probable progress to a pitch of excellence he had exactly not granted that an attainment of this pitch was likely in the least, however uncontested, to satisfy the nature concerned; the foregone conclusion having all the while been that such a spirit was competent to something larger and less superficially calculable, something more expressive of its true inwardness. This was not the way in which things happened among us, for I really think the committed mistake was ever discriminated against--certainly by the head of the family--only to the extent of its acquiring, even if but speedily again to fade, an interest greater than was obtainable by the too obvious success. I am not sure indeed that the kind of personal history most appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parent's view, I think, the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be in his scant measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of his own of appreciating failure, or of not at least piously rejoicing in displayed moral, intellectual, or even material, economies, which, had it not been that his humanity, his generosity and, for the most part, his gaiety, were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have left us with our small savings, our little exhibitions and complacencies, rather on our hands. As the case stood I find myself thinking of our life in those years as profiting greatly for animation and curiosity by the interest he shed for us on the whole side of the human scene usually held least interesting--the element, the appearance, of waste which plays there such a part and into which he could read under provocation so much character and colour and charm, so many implications of the fine and the worthy, that, since the art of missing or of failing, or of otherwise going astray, did after all in his hands escape becoming either a matter of real example or of absolute precept, enlarged not a little our field and our categories of appreciation and perception. I recover as I look back on all this the sense as of an extraordinary young confidence, our common support, in our coming round together, through the immense lubrication of his expressed thought, often perhaps extravagantly working and playing, to plenty of unbewildered rightness, a state of comfort that would always serve--whether after strange openings into a sphere where nothing practical mattered, or after even still quainter closings in upon us of unexpected importances and values. Which means, to my memory, that we breathed somehow an air in which waste, for us at least, couldn't and didn't live, so certain were aberrations and discussions, adventures, excursions and alarms of whatever sort, to wind up in a "transformation scene" or, if the term be not profane, happy harlequinade; a figuration of each involved issue and item before the footlights of a familiar idealism, the most socialised and ironised, the most amusedly generalised, that possibly could be.

Such an atmosphere was, taking one of its elements with another, doubtless delightful; yet if it was friendly to the suggested or imagined thing it promoted among us much less directly, as I have already hinted, the act of choice--choice as to the "career" for example, with a view of the usual proceedings thereupon consequent. I marvel at the manner in which the door appears to have been held or at least left open to us for experiment, though with a tendency to close, the oddest yet most inveterately perceptible movement in that sense, before any very earnest proposition in particular. I have no remembrance at all of marked prejudices on our father's part, but I recall repeated cases, in his attitude to our young affairs, of a disparagement suggested as by stirred memories of his own; the instance most present to me being his extreme tepidity in the matter of William's, or in fact of my, going, on our then American basis, to college. I make out in him, and at the time made out, a great revulsion of spirit from that incurred experience in his own history, a revulsion I think moreover quite independent of any particular or instrinsic attributes of the seat of learning involved in it. Union College, Schenectady, New York, the scene of his personal experiment and the natural resort, in his youth, of comparatively adjacent Albanians, might easily have offered at that time no very rare opportunities--few were the American country colleges that then had such to offer; but when, after years, the question arose for his sons he saw it in I scarce know what light of associational or "subjective" dislike. He had the disadvantage--unless indeed it was much more we who had it--of his having, after many changes and detachments, ceased to believe in the Schenectady resource, or to revert to it sentimentally, without his forming on the other hand, with his boys to place, any fonder presumption or preference. There comes out to me, much bedimmed but recognisable, the image of a day of extreme youth on which, during a stay with our grandmother at Albany, we achieved, William and I, with some confused and heated railway effort, a pious pilgrimage to the small scholastic city--pious by reason, I clearly remember, of a lively persuasion on my brother's part that to Union College, at some indefinite future time, we should both most naturally and delightedly repair. We invoked, I gather, among its scattered shades, fairly vague to me now, the loyalty that our parent appeared to have dropped by the way--even though our attitude about it can scarce have been prematurely contentious; the whole vision is at any rate to-day bathed and blurred for me in the air of some charmed and beguiled dream, that of the flushed good faith of an hour of crude castle-building. We were helped to build, on the spot, by an older friend, much older, as I remember him, even than my brother, already a member of the college and, as it seemed, greatly enjoying his life and those "society" badges and trinkets with which he reappears to me as bristling and twinkling quite to the extinction of his particular identity. This is lost, like everything else, in the mere golden haze of the little old-time autumn adventure. Wondrous to our sensibility may well have been the October glamour--if October it was, and if it was not it ought to have been!--of that big brave region of the great State over which the shade of Fenimore Cooper's Mohawks and Mohicans (if this be not a pleonasm) might still have been felt to hang. The castle we had built, however, crumbled--there were plenty of others awaiting erection; these too successively had their hour, but I needn't at this time stoop to pick up their pieces. I see moreover vividly enough how it might have been that, at this stage, our parents were left cold by the various appeal, in our interest, of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. Hard by, at Providence, in the Newport time, was also "Brown"; but I recover no connection in which that mystic syllable swept our sky as a name to conjure with. Our largest licence somehow didn't stray toward Brown. It was to the same tune not conceivable that we should have been restored for educational purposes to the swollen city, the New York of our childhood, where we had then so tumbled in and out of school as to exhaust the measure, or as at least greatly to deflower the image, of our teachability on that ground. Yale, off our beat from every point of view, was as little to be thought of, and there was moreover in our father's imagination no grain of susceptibility to what might have been, on the general ground, "socially expected." Even Harvard, clearly--and it was perhaps a trifle odd--moved him in our interest as little as Schenectady could do; so that, for authority, the voice of social expectation would have had to sound with an art or an accent of which it had by no means up to that time learned roundabout us the trick. This indeed (it comes to saying) is something that, so far as our parents were concerned, it would never have learned. They were, from other preoccupations, unaware of any such pressure; and to become aware would, I think, primarily have been for them to find it out of all proportion to the general pitch of prescription. We were not at that time, when it came to such claims, in presence of persuasive, much less of impressive, social forms and precedents--at least those of us of the liberated mind and the really more curious culture were not; the more curious culture, only to be known by the positive taste of it, was nowhere in the air, nowhere seated or embodied.

Which reflections, as I perhaps too loosely gather them in, refresh at any rate my sense of how we in particular of our father's house actually profited more than we lost, if the more curious culture was in question, by the degree to which we were afloat and disconnected; since there were at least luxuries of the spirit in this quite as much as drawbacks--given a social order (so far as it _was_ an order) that found its main ideal in a "strict attention to business," that is to buying and selling over a counter or a desk, and in such an intensity of the traffic as made, on the part of all involved, for close localisation. To attend strictly to business was to be invariably _there_, on a certain spot in a certain place; just as to be nowhere in particular, to _have_ to be nowhere, told the queer tale of a lack or of a forfeiture, or possibly even of a state of intrinsic unworthiness. I have already expressed how few of these elements of the background we ourselves had ever had either to add to or to subtract from, and how this of itself did after a fashion "place" us in the small Newport colony of the despoiled and disillusioned, the mildly, the reminiscentially desperate. As easy as might be, for the time, I have also noted, was our footing there; but I have not, for myself, forgotten, or even now outlived, the particular shade of satisfaction to be taken in one's thus being in New England without being of it. To have originally been of it, or still to have had to be, affected me, I recall, as a case I should have regretted--unless it be more exact to say that I thought of the condition as a danger after all escaped. Long would it take to tell why it figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several following years much more to gain than to lose intensity. The question was to fall into the rear indeed, with ever so many such secondary others, during the War, and for reasons effective enough; but it was afterwards to know a luxury of emergence--this, I mean, while one still "cared," in general, as one was sooner or later to stop caring. Infinitely interesting to recover, in the history of a mind, for those concerned, these movements of the spirit, these tides and currents of growth--though under the inconvenience for the historian of such ramifications of research that here at any rate I feel myself warned off. There appeared to us at Newport the most interesting, much, of the Albany male cousins, William James Temple--coming, oddly enough, first from Yale and then from Harvard; so that by contact and example the practicability of a like experience might have been, and doubtless was, put well before us. "Will" Temple, as we were in his short life too scantly to know him, had made so luckless, even if so lively a start under one alma mater that the appeal to a fresh parentship altogether appears to have been judged the best remedy for his case: he entered Harvard jumping, if I mistake not, a couple of years of the undergraduate curriculum, and my personal memory of these reappearances is a mere recapture of admiration, of prostration, before him. The dazzled state, under his striking good looks and his manly charm, was the common state; so that I disengage from it no presumption of a particular plea playing in our own domestic air for his temporary Cambridge setting; he was so much too radiant and gallant and personal, too much a character and a figure, a splendid importance in himself, to owe the least glamour to settings; an advantage that might have seemed rather to be shed on whatever scene by himself in consenting to light it up. He made all life for the hour a foreground, and one that we none of us would have quitted for a moment while he was there.

In that form at least I see him, and no revival of those years so puts to me the interesting question, so often aimlessly returned upon in later life, of the amount of truth in this or that case of young confidence in a glory to come--for another than one's self; of the likelihood of the wonders so flatteringly forecast. Many of our estimates were monstrous magnifications--though doing us even at that more good than harm; so that one isn't even sure that the happiest histories were to have been those of the least liberal mistakes. I like at any rate to think of our easy overstrainings--the possible flaw in many of which was not indeed to be put to the proof. That was the case for the general, and for every particular, impression of Will Temple, thanks to his early death in battle--at Chancellorsville, 1863; he having, among the quickened forces of the time, and his father's record helping him, leaped to a captaincy in the regular Army; but I cling to the idea that the siftings and sortings of life, had he remained subject to them, would still have left him the lustre that blinds and subdues. I even do more, at this hour; I ask myself, while his appearance and my personal feeling about it live for me again, what possible aftertime could have kept up the pitch of my sentiment--aftertime either of his or of mine. Blest beyond others, I think as we look back, the admirations, even the fondest (and which indeed were not of their nature fond?) that were not to know to their cost the inevitable test or strain; they are almost the only ones, of the true high pitch, that, without broken edges or other tatters to show, fold themselves away entire and secure, even as rare lengths of precious old stuff, in the scented chest of our savings. So great misadventure have too often known at all events certain of those that were to come to trial. The others are the _residual_, those we must keep when we can, so to be sure at least of a few, sacrificing as many possible mistakes and misproportions as need be to pay but for two or three of them. There could be no mistake about Gus Barker, who threw himself into the fray, that is into the cavalry saddle, as he might into a match at baseball (football being then undreamt of), and my last reminiscence of whom is the sight of him, on a brief leave for a farewell to his Harvard classmates after he had got his commission, crossing with two or three companions the expanse of Harvard Square that faced the old Law School, of which I found myself for that year (1862-63) a singularly alien member. I was afterwards sharply to regret the accident by which I on that occasion missed speech of him; but my present vision of his charming latent agility, which any motion showed, of his bright-coloured wagging head and of the large gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out, is after all the years but the more happily uneffaced. The point of all which connections, however, is that they somehow managed to make in the parental view no straight links for us with the matter-of-course of college. There were accidents too by the aid of which they failed of this the more easily. It comes to me that, for my own part, I thought of William at the time as having, or rather as so much more than having, already graduated; the effect of contact with his mind and talk, with the free play of his spirit and the irrepressible brush of his humour, couldn't have been greater had he carried off fifty honours. I felt in him such authority, so perpetually quickened a state of intellect and character, that the detail or the literal side of the question never so much as came up for me: I must have made out that to plenty of graduates, or of the graduating, nothing in the nature of such appearances attached. I think of our father moreover as no less affected by a like impression; so extremely, so immensely disposed do I see him to generalise his eldest son's gifts as by the largest, fondest synthesis, and not so much proceed upon them in any one direction as proceed _from_ them, as it were, in all.

Little as such a view might have lent itself to application, my brother's searching discovery during the summer of 1861 that his vocation was not "after all" in the least satisfyingly for Art, took on as a prompt sequel the recognition that it was quite positively and before everything for Science, physical Science, strenuous Science in all its exactitude; with the opportunity again forthcoming to put his freshness of faith to the test. I had presumed to rejoice before at his adoption of the studio life, that offering as well possible contacts for myself; and yet I recall no pang for his tergiversation, there being nothing he mightn't have done at this or at any other moment that I shouldn't have felt as inevitable and found in my sense of his previous age some happy and striking symptom or pledge of. As certain as that he had been all the while "artistic" did it thus appear that he had been at the same time quite otherwise inquiring too--addicted to "experiments" and the consumption of chemicals, the transfusion of mysterious liquids from glass to glass under exposure to lambent flame, the cultivation of stained fingers, the establishment and the transport, in our wanderings, of galvanic batteries, the administration to all he could persuade of electric shocks, the maintenance of marine animals in splashy aquaria, the practice of photography in the room I for a while shared with him at Boulogne, with every stern reality of big cumbrous camera, prolonged exposure, exposure mostly of myself, darkened development, also interminable, and ubiquitous brown blot. Then there had been also the constant, as I fearfully felt it, the finely speculative and boldly disinterested absorption of curious drugs. No livelier remembrance have I of our early years together than this inveteracy, often appalling to a nature so incurious as mine in _that_ direction, of his interest in the "queer" or the incalculable effects of things. There was apparently for him no possible effect whatever that mightn't be more or less rejoiced in as such--all exclusive of its relation to other things than merely knowing. There recurs to me withal the shamelessness of my own indifference--at which I also, none the less, I think, wondered a little; as if by so much as it hadn't been given me to care for visibly provoked or engineered phenomena, by that same amount was I open to those of the mysteriously or insidiously aggressive, the ambushed or suffered sort. Vivid to me in any case is still the sense of how quite shiningly light, as an activity and an appeal, he had seemed to make everything he gave himself to; so that at first, until the freshness of it failed, he flung this iridescent mantle of interest over the then so grey and scant little scene of the Harvard (the Lawrence) Scientific School, where in the course of the months I had had a glimpse or two of him at work. Early in the autumn of 1861 he went up from Newport to Cambridge to enter that institution; in which thin current rather than in the ostensibly more ample began to flow his long connection with Harvard, gathering in time so many affluents. His letters from Cambridge during the next couple of years, many of them before me now, breathe, I think, all the experience the conditions could have begotten at the best; they mark the beginning of those vivacities and varieties of intellectual and moral reaction which were for the rest of his life to be the more immeasurably candid and vivid, the more numerous above all, and the more interesting and amusing, the closer view one had of him. That of a certainty; yet these familiar pages of youth testify most of all for me perhaps to the forces of amenity and spontaneity, the happy working of all relations, in our family life. In such parts of them as I may cite this will shine sufficiently through--and I shall take for granted thus the interest of small matters that have perhaps but that reflected light to show. It is in a letter to myself, of that September, dated "Drear and Chill Abode," that he appears to have celebrated the first steps of his initiation.

Sweet was your letter and grateful to my eyes. I had gone in a mechanical way to the P.O. not hoping for anything (though "on espere alors qu'on desespere toujours,") and, finding nothing, was turning heavily away when a youth modestly tapped me and, holding out an envelope inscribed in your well-known character, said, "Mr. J., this was in our box!" 'Twas the young Pascoe, the joy of his mother--but the graphic account I read in the letter he gave me of the sorrow of my mother almost made me shed tears on the floor of the P.O. Not that on reflection I should dream----! for reflection shows me a future in which she shall regard my vacation visits as "on the whole" rather troublesome than otherwise; or at least when she shall feel herself as blest in the trouble I spare her when absent as in the glow of pride and happiness she feels at the sight of me when present. But she needn't fear I can ever think of _her_ when absent with such equanimity. I oughtn't to "joke on such a serious subject," as Bobby would say though; for I have had several pangs since being here at the thought of all I have left behind at Newport--especially gushes of feeling about the _place_. I haven't for one minute had the feeling of being at home here. Something in my quarters precludes the possibility of it, though what this is I don't suppose I can describe to you.

As I write now even, writing itself being a cosy cheerful-looking amusement, and an argand gas-burner with a neat green shade merrily singing beside me, I still feel unsettled. I write on a round table in the middle of the room, with a fearful red and black cloth. Before me I see another such-covered table of oblong shape against the wall, capped by a cheap looking-glass and flanked by two windows, curtainless and bleak, whose shades of linen flout the air as the sportive wind impels them. To the left are two other such windows, with a horse-hair sofa between them, and at my back a fifth window and a vast wooden mantel-piece with nothing to relieve its nakedness but a large cast, much plumbago'd, of a bust of Franklin. On my right the Bookcase, imposing and respectable with its empty drawers and with my little array of printed wisdom covering nearly _one_ of the shelves. I hear the people breathe as they go past in the street, and the roll and jar of the horse-cars is terrific. I have accordingly engaged the other room from Mrs. Pascoe, with the little sleeping-room upstairs. It looks infinitely more cheerful than this, and if I don't find the grate sufficient I can easily have a Franklin stove put up. But she says the grate will make an oven of it.... John Ropes I met the other day at Harry Quincy's room, and was very much pleased with him. Don't fail to send on Will Temple's letters to him and to Herbert Mason, which I left in one of the library's mantelpiece jars, to use the Portuguese idiom. Storrow Higginson has been very kind to me, making enquiries about tables etc. We went together this morning to the house of the Curator of the Gray collection of Engravings, which is solemnly to unfold its glories to me to-morrow. He is a most serious stately German gentleman, Mr. Thies by name, fully sensible of the deep vital importance of his treasures and evidently thinking a visit to them a great affair--to _me_. Had I known how great, how tremendous and formal, I hardly think I should have ventured to call. Tom Ward pays me a visit almost every evening. Poor Tom seems a-cold too. His deafness keeps him from making acquaintances. Professor Eliot, at the School, is a fine fellow, I suspect; a man who if he resolves to do a thing won't be prevented. I find analysis very interesting _so far_! The Library has a reading-room, where they take all the magazines; so I shan't want for the Rev. des 2 M. I remain with unalterable sentiments of devotion ever, my dear H., your Big Brother Bill.

This record of further impressions closely and copiously followed.

Your letter this morning was such a godsend that I hasten to
respond a line or two, though I have no business to--for I have a
fearful lesson to-morrow and am going to Boston to-night to hear
Agassiz lecture (12 lectures on "Methods in Nat. Hist."), so that I
will only tell you that I am very well and my spirits just getting
good. Miss Upham's table is much pleasanter than the other.
Professor F. J. Child is a great joker--he's a little flaxen-headed
boy of about 40. There is a nice old lady boarder, another man of
about 50, of aristocratic bearing, who interests me much, and 3
intelligent students. At the other table was no conversation at
all; the fellows had that American solemnity, called each other
Sir, etc. I cannot tell you, dearest Mother, how your account of
your Sunday dinner and of your feelings thereat brought tears to my
eyes. Give Father my ardent love and cover with kisses the round
fair face of the most kiss-worthy Alice. Then kiss the Aunt till
you get tired, and get all the rest of them to kiss _you_ till you
cry hold enough!

This morning as I was busy over the 10th page of a letter to Wilky
in he popped and made my labour of no account. I had intended to go
and see him yesterday, but found Edward Emerson and Tom Ward were
going, and so thought he would have too much of a good thing. But
he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he
went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and
took him to dinner, and he is now gone to see Andrew Robeson and E.
E. His plump corpusculus looks as always. I write in my new parlour
whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it
is on the old affair--worth double the cost, and the little bedroom
under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook on
little back yards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is
upon _this_ room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a
capital thing in winter. I like Miss Upham's very much. Dark
"aristocratic" dining-room, with royal cheer. "Fish, roast beef,
veal cutlets, pigeons!" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking,
white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for
dessert a choice of three, _three_, darling Mother, of the most
succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a
celestial unction without the oil) pie-like confections, always 2
platesful--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical,
combination of cake and jam and cream which I recommend to Mother
if she is ever at a loss; though there is no well-stored pantry
like that of good old Kay Street, or if there is it exists not for
miserable me.

This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am
"muddled and bet" and have to employ almost all my time reading up.
Agassiz is evidently a great favourite with his Boston audience and
feels it himself. But he's an admirable earnest lecturer, clear as
day, and his accent is most fascinating. Jeffries Wyman's lectures
on Comp. Anatomy of Verts. promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a
little and monotonous, but plain and well-arranged and nourris.
Eliot I have not seen much more of; I don't believe he is a _very_
accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. We are only about 12 in
the Laboratory, so that we have a very cosy time. I expect to have
a winter of "crowded life." I can be as independent as I please,
and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of every
one. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too
that the native hue of resolution has never been of very great
shade in me hitherto. I am sure that that feeling is a right one,
and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do so I think I
shall turn out all right.

I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilky the rosy-gilled and
Frank Higginson came in. I now resume it by the light of a taper
and that of the moon. Wilky read H.'s letter and amused me "metch"
by his naive interpretation of Mother's most rational request that
I should "keep a memorandum of all moneys I receive from Father."
He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums her
prodigal philosopher really gives out, and that mistrust of his
generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as H.
subtly framed it, I confess!

The first few days, the first week here, I really didn't know what
to do with myself or how to fill my time. I felt as if turned out
of doors. I then received H.'s and Mother's letters. Never before
did I know what mystic depths of rapture lay concealed within that
familiar word. Never did the same being look so like two different
ones as I going in and out of the P.O. if I bring a letter with me.
Gloomily, with despair written on my leaden brow I stalk the street
along towards the P.O., women, children and students involuntarily
shrinking against the wall as I pass--thus,[4] as if the curse of
Cain were stamped upon my front. But when I come out with a letter
an immense concourse of people generally attends me to my lodging,
attracted by my excited wild gestures and look.

Christmas being sparely kept in the New England of those days, William passed that of 1861, as a Cambridge letter of the afternoon indicates, without opportunity for a seasonable dash to Newport, but with such compensations, nearer at hand as are here exhibited. Our brother Wilky, I should premise, had been placed with the youngest of us, Bob, for companion, at the "co-educational" school then but a short time previously established by Mr. F. B. Sanborn at Concord, Massachusetts--and of which there will be more to say. "Tom" Ward, already mentioned and who, having left the Concord school shortly before, had just entered Harvard, was quickly to become William's intimate, approved and trusted friend; the diversion of whose patient originality, whose intellectual independence, ability and curiosity from science and free inquiry to hereditary banking--consequent on the position of the paternal Samuel Gray Ward as the representative for many years in the United States of the house of Baring Brothers--he from the first much regretted: the more pertinently doubtless that this companion was of a family "connected" with ours through an intermarriage, Gus Barker, as Mrs. S. G. Ward's nephew, being Tom's first cousin as well as ours, and such links still counting, in that age of comparatively less developed ramifications, when sympathy and intercourse kept pace as it was kept between our pairs of parents.

I have been in Boston the whole blest morning, toted round by the
Wards, who had as usual asked me to dine with them. I had happily
provided myself with an engagement here for all such emergencies,
but, as is my sportive wont, I befooled Tom with divers answers,
and finally let him believe I would come (having refused several
dazzling chances for the purpose) supposing of course I should see
him here yesterday at Miss Upham's board and disabuse him. But the
young viper went home right after breakfast--so I had to go into
Boston this morning and explain. Wilky had come up from Concord to
dine in said Commonwealth Avenue, and I, as it turned out, found
myself in for following the innocent lamb Lily up and down the town
for two hours, to hold bundles and ring bells for her; Wilky and
Tom having vanished from the scene. Clear sharp cold morning,
thermometer 5 degrees at sunrise, and the streets covered with one
glare of ice. I had thick smooth shoes and went sliding off like an
avalanche every three steps, while she, having india-rubbers and
being a Bostonian, went ahead like a swan. I had among other things
to keep her bundles from harm, to wipe away every three minutes the
trembling jewel with which the cold _would_ with persistent
kindness ornament my coral nose; to keep a hypocritic watchful eye
on her movements lest she fall; to raise my hat gracefully to more
and more of her acquaintances every block; to skate round and round
embracing lamp-posts and door-scrapers by the score to keep from
falling, as well as to avoid serving old lady-promenaders in the
same way; to cut capers 4 feet high at the rate of 20 a second,
every now and then, for the same purpose; to keep from scooting
off down hills and round corners as fast as my able-bodied
companion; often to do all these at once and then fall lickety-bang
like a chandelier, but _when_ so to preserve an expression of
placid beatitude or easy nonchalance despite the raging fiend
within: oh it beggars description! When finally it was over and I
stood alone I shook my companion's dust from my feet and, biting my
beard with rage, sware a mighty oath unto high heaven that I would
never, while reason held her throne in this distracted orb, _never_
NEVER, by word, look or gesture and this without mental
reservation, acknowledge a "young lady" as a human being. The false
and rotten spawn might die before I would wink to save it. No more
Parties now!--at last I am a Man, etc., etc.!

My enthusiasm ran very high for a few minutes, but I suddenly saw
that I was a great ass and became sobered instantly, so that on the
whole I am better for the circumstance, being a sadder and a wiser
man. I also went to the Tappans' and gave the children slight
presents; then, coming home to my venal board, behaved very
considerately and paternally to a young lady who sat next to me,
but with a shade of subdued melancholy in my manner which could not
have been noticed at the breakfast-table. Many times and bitterly
to-day have I thought of home and lamented that I should have to be
away at this merry Christmastide from my rare family; wondering,
with Wilky, if they were missing us as we miss them. And now as I
sit in the light of my kerosene, with the fire quietly consuming in
the grate and the twilight on the snow outside and the melancholy
old-fashioned strains of the piano dimly rising from below, I see
in vision those at home just going in to dinner; my aged, silvered
Mother leaning on the arm of her stalwart yet flexible H., merry
and garrulous as ever, my blushing Aunt with her old wild beauty
still hanging about her, my modest Father with his rippling raven
locks, the genial auld Rob and the mysterious Alice, all rise
before me, a glorified throng; but two other forms, one tall,
intellectual, swarthy, with curved nose and eagle eye, the other
having breadth rather than depth, but a goodly morsel too, are
wanting to complete the harmonious whole. Eftsoons they vanish and
I am again alone, _alone_--what pathos in the word! I have two
companions though, most all the time--remorse and despair! T. S.
Perry took their place for a little, and to-day they have not come
back. T. S. seemed to enjoy his visit very much. It was very
pleasant for me to have him; his rustic wonder at the commonest
sights was most ludicrous, and his conversation most amusing and
instructive.

The place here improves to me as I go on living in it, and if I
study with Agassiz 4 or 5 years there is nothing I should like
better than to have you all with me, regular and comfortable. I
enclose another advertisement of a house--but which would be too
small for us, I believe, though it might be looked at. I had a long
talk with one of A.'s students the other night, and saw for the
first time how a naturalist may feel about his trade exactly as an
artist does about his. For instance Agassiz would rather take
wholly uninstructed people--"for he has to unteach them all they
have learnt." He doesn't let them so much as look into a book for a
long while; what they learn they must learn for themselves and be
_masters_ of it all. The consequence is he makes Naturalists of
them--doesn't merely cram them; and this student (he had been there
2 years) said he felt ready to go anywhere in the world now with
nothing but his notebook and study out anything quite alone. A.
must be a great teacher. Chemistry comes on tolerably, but not so
fast as I expected. I am pretty slow with my substances, having
done but 12 since Thanksgiving and having 38 more to do before the
end of the term.

Comment on the abundance, the gaiety and drollery, the generous play of vision and fancy in all this, would seem so needless as to be almost officious, were not the commentator constantly, were he not infinitely, arrested and reminded and solicited; which is at once his advantage and his embarrassment. Such a letter, at all events, read over with the general key, touches its contemporary scene and hour into an intensity of life for him; making indeed the great sign of that life my brother's signal vivacity and cordiality, his endless spontaneity of mind. Every thing in it is characteristic of the genius and expressive of the mood, and not least, of course, the pleasantry of paradox, the evocation of each familiar image by its vivid opposite. Our mother, _e.g._, was not at that time, nor for a good while yet, so venerably "silvered"; our handsome-headed father had lost, occipitally, long before, all pretence to raven locks, certainly to the effect of their "rippling"; the beauty of our admirable aunt was as happily alien either to wildness or to the "hanging" air as it could very well be; the "mystery" of our young sister consisted all in the candour of her natural bloom, even if at the same time of her lively intelligence; and H.'s mirth and garrulity appear to have represented for the writer the veriest ironic translation of something in that youth, I judge, not a little mildly--though oh _so_ mildly!--morose or anxiously mute. To the same tune the aquiline in his own nose heroically derides the slightly relaxed line of that feature; and our brother Wilky's want of physical "depth" is a glance at a different proportion. Of a like tinge of pleasantry, I may add, is the imputation of the provincial gape to our friend T. S. Perry, of Newport birth and unintermitted breeding, with whom we were to live so much in the years to come, and who was then on the eve of entering Harvard--his face already uninterruptedly turned to that love of letters, that practice of them by dauntless and inordinate, though never at all vulgarly resonant, absorption which was to constitute in itself the most disinterested of careers. I had myself felt him from the first an exemplary, at once, and a discouraging friend; he had let himself loose in the world of books, pressed and roamed through the most various literatures and the most voluminous authors, with a stride that, as it carried him beyond all view, left me dismayed and helpless at the edge of the forest, where I listened wistfully but unemulously to the far-off crash from within of his felled timber, the clearing of whole spaces or periods shelf by shelf or great tree by tree. The brother-in-law of John La Farge, he had for us further, with that reviving consciousness of American annals which the War was at once so rudely and so insidiously to quicken in us, the glamour of his straight descent from the Commodores Perry of the Lake Erie in the war of 1812, respectively, and of the portentous penetration of Japan just after the mid-century, and his longer-drawn but equally direct and so clean and comfortable affiliation to the great Benjamin Franklin: as these things at least seemed to me under my habit (too musing and brooding certainly to have made for light loquacity) of pressing every wind-borne particle of personal history--once the persons were only other enough from myself--into the service of what I would fain have called picture or, less explicitly, less formulatedly, romance.

These, however, are but too fond insistences, and what mainly bears pointing out is my brother's already restless reach forth to some new subject of study. He had but lately addressed himself, not without confidence, to such an investigation of Chemistry as he might become conscious of a warrant for, yet the appeal of Agassiz's great authority, so much in the air of the Cambridge of that time, found him at once responsive; it opened up a world, the world of sentient life, in the light of which Chemistry faded. He had not, however, for the moment done with it; and what I at any rate find most to the point in the pages before me is the charm of their so witnessing to the geniality and harmony of our family life, exquisite as I look back on it and reflected almost as much in any one passage taken at hazard as in any other. He had apparently, at the date of the following, changed his lodging.

President Felton's death has been the great event of the week--two
funerals and I don't know how many prayers and sermons. To-day I
thought I would go to University chapel for the sake of variety and
hear Dr. Peabody's final word on him--and a very long and
lugubrious one it was. The prayer was a prolonged moan in which the
death (not in its consequences, but in itself) was treated as a
great calamity, and the whole eulogy was almost ridiculously
overcharged. What was most disagreeable throughout was the wailing
tones, not a bit that of simple pagan grief at the _loss_--which
would have been honest; but a whine consciously put on as from a
sense of duty, and a whine at nothing definite either, only a
purposeless clothing of all his words in tears. The whole style of
the performance was such that I have concluded to have nothing more
to do with funerals till they improve.

The walking here has been terrible with ice or slush these many
weeks, but over head celestial. No new developments in this house.
The maniac sometimes chills my very marrow by hoarsely whispering
outside the door, "Gulielmo, Gulielmo!" Old Sweetser sits in his
dressing-gown smoking his pipe all day in a little uncomfortable
old _bathroom_ next door to me. He may with truth be called a
queer cuss. The young ladies have that very nasty immodest habit of
hustling themselves out of sight precipitately whenever I appear. I
dined with Mrs. ---- yesterday all alone. She was quite sick, very
hoarse, and _he_ was in the country, so that on the whole it was a
great bore. She is very clumsy in her way of doing things, and her
invitation to me was for the wife of an artist--not artistic!

I am now studying organic Chemistry. It will probably shock Mother
to hear that I yesterday destroyed a pockethandkerchief--but it was
an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather
brown is very good. I believe I forgot to tell you that I am shorn
of my brightest ornament. That solitary hirsute jewel which lent
such a manly and martial aspect to my visage is gone, and the place
thereof is naked. I don't think anyone will know the difference,
and moreover it is not dead, it only sleeps and will some day rise
phoenix-like from its ashes with tenfold its former beauty. When
Father comes will he please bring Ganot's Physique _if H. doesn't
want it_?

In none of these earlier communications from Cambridge is the element of affectionate pleasantry more at play than in those addressed to his sister.

Charmante jeune fille, I find the Tappans _really_ expected me to
bring you to them and were much disappointed at my failure. Ellen
has grown very fat and big. Mary calls everybody "horrid." Lyly
Barker is with the Wards. I haven't seen her yet, but shall do so
on Saturday, when I am also to dine with the Hunts. I hope your
neuralgia, or whatever you may believe the thing was, has gone and
that you are back at school instead of languishing and lolling
about the house. I send you herewith a portrait of Prof. Eliot, a
very fair likeness, to grace your book withal. Write me whenever
you have the slightest or most fleeting inclination to do so. If
you have only one sentence to say, don't grudge paper and stamps
for it. You don't know how much good you may do me at an
appropriate time by a little easy scratching of your graceful
nimble pen.

In another apostrophe to the same correspondent, at the same season, his high spirits throw off the bonds of the vernacular.

Est-ce que tu songes jamais a moi comme moi je songe a toi?--oh je
crois bien que non! Maintes fois dans la journee l'image d'une
espece d'ange vetue de blanc avec de longs boucles noirs qui
encadrent une figure telle que la plupart des mortels ne font que
l'entrevoir dans leur reves, s'impose a mes sens ravis; creature
longue et fluette qui se dispose a se coucher dans une petite
chambrette verte ou le gaz fait un grand jour. Eh, oua, oua, oua!
c'est a faire mourir de douleur. Mais je parie que tout de meme pas
une etincelle ne vibre pour moi dans les fibres de ton coeur
endurci. Helas, oublie de mes parents et de mes semblables, je ne
vois, ou que je regarde, qu'un abime de desespoir, un gouffre noir
et peuple de demons, qui tot ou tard va m'engloutir. Tu ne m'ecris
jamais sauf pour me soutirer des objets de luxe. La vaste mere me
deteste, il n'y a que le frere qui me reste attache, et lui par
esprit d'opposition plus que par autre chose. Eh mon Dieu, que
vais-je devenir? En tout cas je vais clore cette lettre, qui s'est
allongee malgre moi. Ton frere, James William.

Of the same bright complexion is this report, addressed to his parents, of the change of lodging already noted.

The presence of the Tweedys has been most agreeable and has
contributed in no small degree to break the shock of removal to
these new rooms, which are not near so cosy as the old; especially
with the smoking of my stove, which went on all the first two days.
That has been stopped, however, and the only trouble is now to get
the fire alight at all. I have generally to start it 3 or 4 times,
and the removal of the material of each failure from the grate is a
fearful business. I have also to descend to the cellar myself to
get my coal, and my "hod," as Ma Sweetser, my land-lady, calls it,
not being very much bigger than a milk-pitcher, doesn't add to the
charm. The coal is apt to drop on the stairs, and I have to pick it
all up. At present the stove fills the room with a nephitic and
pestilential gas, so that I have to keep the window open. I went
last night with the Tweedys to the concert for which they came up,
and with them this morning to hear Wendell Phillips. This Sweetser
family is worthy of Dickens. It consists of a Mr. and Miss S., Mr.
S.'s three gushing girls, a parrot and a maniac. The maniac is very
obstreperous. Her husband left her boarding here 3 months ago and
went to Cuba. When she got mad he was written to, but has sent no
reply, and they are keeping her. For the Aunt's sake I keep my
drawer locked against her at night. Old Sweetser is a riddle I hope
to do justice to at some future time, but can't begin on now. His
sister shakes like an aspen whenever she is spoken to. Oh I forgot
the most important character of all, the black wench who "does" the
room. She is about 20 years old and wears short frocks, but talks
like Alice Robeson and has an antediluvian face about as large as
the top of a flour-barrel.

I can really keep my hand from nothing, of whatever connection, that causes his intensity of animation and spontaneity of expression to revive. On a Sunday evening early in 1862 he had

just returned from Milton, and, after removing from my person a
beetle, sit down to write you immediately. Ever since 10.30 this
A.M. the beetle s'est promene a l'envi sur ma peau. The first
feeling I had of his becoming attached to it made me jump so as to
scare an old lady opposite me in the car into fits. Finding him too
hard to crush I let him run, and at last got used to him though at
times he tickled me to excruciation. I ache in every limb and every
cranny of my mind from my visit.... They had the usual number of
stories, wonderful and not wonderful, to tell of their friends and
relatives (of Stephen somebody, _e.g._, who had a waggon weighing
several tons run over his chest without even bruising him, and so
on). They are very nice girls indeed all the same. I then went,
near by, to the Forbes's in a state of profuse perspiration, and
saw handsome Mrs. F. and her daughters, and a substitute for
Governor Andrew in the person of his wife; after which I returned
here, being driven back in the car, as I perceived on the front
platform, by our old familiar--familiar indeed!--friend William (I
mean our Irish ex-coachman) whom age doesn't seem to render more
veracious, as he told me several very big stories about himself:
how he smashed a car to pieces the other night, how he first gave
the alarm of the great fire, etc.