them are among the first six selected for inclusion here. The fun and extravagance of these early letters is so full of an intimate raillery that they should be read in their context in that book, where the whole family has been made to live again. The first of the letters that follow was written a few weeks after the opening of the autumn term in which James began his course in chemistry. The son of Professor Benjamin Peirce (the mathematician) of whom it makes mention was the brilliant but erratic Charles S. Peirce, to whom other references appear in later letters, and whose name James subsequently associated with his pragmatism. "Harry," "Wilky" and "Bobby" will be recognized as William's younger brothers. Wilky was at the Sanborn School in Concord, thirteen miles away. Bobby was in Newport, under the parental roof at 13 Kay Street. The Emerson referred to was R. W. Emerson's son, Edward W. Emerson, and "Tom" Ward, the Thomas W. Ward of a lifelong friendship and of several later letters and allusions.
To his Family
DEAREST FAMILY,—This morning, as I was busy over the tenth page of a letter to Wilky, in he popped and made my labor of no account. I had intended to go and see him yesterday, but concluded to delay as I had plenty of work to do and did not wish to take the relish off the visits by making them frequent when I was not home-sick. Moreover, Emerson and Tom Ward were going on, and I 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 Emerson. His plump corpusculus looks as always. He says it is pretty lonely at Concord and he misses Bob's lively and sportive wiles very much in the long and lone and dreary evenings, tho' he consoles himself by thinking he will have a great time at study. I have at last got to feel quite settled and homelike. I write in my new parlor whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it is on the old affair, worth double the price, and the little bedroom under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook upon little backyards 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 Mrs. Upham's very much. Dark, aristocratic dining-room, with royal cheer—"fish, roast-beef, veal-cutlets or 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 of the most succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a celestial unction without the oil) pie-ey confections, always two plates full—my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, combination of jam and cake and cream, which I recommend to mother if she is ever at a loss; though she has no well-stored pantry like that of good old 13 Kay Street; or if she has, it exists not for miserable me. I get up at six, breakfast and study till nine, when I go to school till one, when dinner, a short loaf and work again till five, then gymnasium or walk till tea, and after that, visit, work, literature, correspondence, etc., etc., till ten, when I "divest myself of my wardrobe" and lay my weary head upon my downy pillow and dreamily think of dear old home and Father and Mother and brothers and sister and aunt and cousins and all that the good old Newport sun shines upon, until consciousness is lost. My time last week was fully occupied, and I suspect will be so all winter—I hope so.
This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am entirely "muddled and beat"20 and have to employ most all my time reading up. Agassiz gives now a course of lectures in Boston, to which I have been. He is evidently a great favorite with his audience and feels so himself. But he is an admirable, earnest lecturer, clear as day, and his accent is most fascinating. I should like to study under him. Prof. Wyman's lectures on [the] Comp[arative] anatomy of vert[ebrates] promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a little and monotonous, but plain and packed full and well arranged (nourris). Eliot I have not seen much of; I don't believe he is a very accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. Young [Charles] Atkinson, nephew of Miss Staigg's friend, is a very nice boy. I walked over to Brookline yesterday afternoon with him to see his aunt, who received me very cordially. There is something extremely good about her. The rest of this year's class is nothing wonderful. In last year's there is a son of Prof. Peirce, whom I suspect to be a very "smart" fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent and violent though. [Storrow] Higginson I like very well. [John] Ropes is always out, so I have not seen him again.
We are only about twelve 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 everyone. 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. But I am sure that that feeling is a right one, and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do, I think I shall turn out all right.
I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilk the rosy-gilled and Higginson came in. I now resume it after tea by the light of a taper and that of the moon. This room is without gas and I must get some of the jovial Harry's abhorred kerosene tomorrow. Wilk read Harry's letter and amused me "metch" by his naïve interpretation of mother's most rational request "that I should keep a memorandum of all monies I receive from Father." He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums the prodigal philosopher really gave out, and that mistrust of his generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as Harry framed it, I confess....
"Kitty" Temple, next addressed, was the eldest of four Temple cousins, who were daughters of Henry James, Senior's, favorite sister. Having lost both their parents the Temple children had come to live in Newport under the care of their paternal aunt, Mrs. Edmund Tweedie. The fast friendship between the elder Jameses and the Tweedies, the relationship between the two groups of children and the parity of their ages resulted in the Jameses, Temples and Tweedies all living almost as one family. "Minny," Kitty's younger sister, was about seventeen years old and was the enchanting and most adored of all the charming and freely circulating young relatives with whom William had more or less grown up. Henry James drew two of his most appealing heroines from her image,—Minny Theale in the "Wings of the Dove" and Isabel Archer in "The Portrait of a Lady,"—and she is still more authentically revealed by references that recur in "Notes of a Son and Brother" and in the bundle of her own letters with which that volume beautifully closes. In a long-after year William, who was fondly devoted to her, received an early letter of hers containing an affectionate reference to himself and wrote to the friend who had sent it: "I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now. As for knowing her as she is now??!! I find that she means as much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did, being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience of people. Thank you once more for what you have done." At the time of the next letter, "Minny" had just cut her hair short, and a photograph of her new aspect was the occasion of the badinage about her madness. "Dr. Prince" was an alienist to whom another James cousin had lately been married.
To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet)
My dear Kitty,—Imagine if you can with what palpitations I tore open the rude outer envelope of your precious, long-looked-for missive. I read it by the glimmer of the solitary lamp which at eventide lights up the gloom of the dark and humid den called Post Office. And as I read on unconscious of the emotion I was betraying, a vast crowd collected. Profs. Agassiz and Wyman ran with their note-books and proceeded to take observations of the greatest scientific import. I with difficulty reached my lodgings. When thereout fell the Photograph. Wheeeew! oohoo! aha! la-la! [Marks representing musical flourish] boisteroso triumphissimmo, chassez to the right, cross over, forward two, hornpipe and turn summerset! Up came the fire engines; but I proudly waved them aside and plunged bareheaded into the chill and gloomy bowels of the night, to recover by violent exercise the use of my reasoning faculties, which had almost been annihilated by the shock of happiness. As I stalked along,
The expression was undoubtedly recognized in Kay Street as borrowed from the Lincolnshire boor, in Fitzjames Stephen's Essay on Spirit-Rapping, who ended his life with the words, "What with faith, and what with the earth a-turning round the sun, and what with the railroads a-fuzzing and a-whizzing, I'm clean stonied, muddled and beat."
