To William James

Le Plantier,
Costebelle,
Hyères.

April 22nd, 1899.

Dearest William,

I greatly appreciate the lucidity and liberality of your so interesting letter of the 19th, telling me of your views and prospects for next summer &c—of all of which I am now able to make the most intimate profit. I enter fully into your reasons for wanting to put in the summer quietly and concentratedly in Cambridge—so much that with work unfinished and a spacious house and library of your "very own" to contain you, I ask myself how you can be expected to do anything less. Only it all seems to mean that I shall see you all but scantly and remotely. However, I shall wring from it when the time comes every concession that can be snatched, and shall meanwhile watch your signs and symptoms with my biggest opera-glass (the beautiful one, one of the treasures of my life: que je vous dois.)

Nothing you tell me gives me greater pleasure than what you say of the arrangements made for Harry and Billy in the forest primeval and the vision of their drawing therefrom experiences of a sort that I too miserably lacked (poor Father!) in my own too casual youth. What I most of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep doing for them, is their being à même to contract local saturations and attachments in respect to their own great and glorious country, to learn, and strike roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and variety. Then they won't, as I do now, have to assimilate, but half-heartedly, the alien splendours—inferior ones too, as I believe—of the indigestible midi of Bourget and the Vicomte Melchior de Vogüé, kindest of hosts and most brilliant of commensaux as I am in the act of finding both these personages. The beauty here is, after my long stop at home, admirable and exquisite; but make the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything their own countries and climates can give de pareil et de supérieur. Its being that "own" will double their use of it.... This little estate (two houses—near together—in a 25-acre walled "parc" of dense pine and cedar, along a terraced mountain-side, with exquisite views inland and to the sea) is a precious and enviable acquisition. The walks are innumerable, the pleasant "wildness" of the land (universally accessible) only another form of sweetness, and the light, the air, the noble, graceful lines &c., all of the first order. It's classic—Claude—Virgil....

I expect to get to Genoa on the 4th or 5th April, and there to make up my mind as to how I can best spend the following eight weeks, in Italy, in evasion and seclusion. Unhappily I must go to Rome, and Rome is infernal. But I shall make short work of it. My nostalgia for Lamb House is already such as to make me capable de tout. Never again will I leave it. I don't take you up on the Philippines—I admire you and agree with you too much. You have an admirable eloquence. But the age is all to the vulgar!... Farewell with a wide embrace.

Ever your
HENRY.