To W. D. Howells

34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Jan. 29th [1893].

My dear Howells,

Two beneficent notes have I had from you since last I wrote you a word: one in regard to looking, effectively, after some Cosmopolitan business in the autumn; the other a heavenly remark or two (still further sublimated by Mildred's lovely photograph) in lately forwarding me—with a courtesy worthy of a better cause—a particularly shameless autograph-seeker's letter. For such and all of these good gifts I am more thankful than the hurrying, days have left me much of a chance to tell you. Most especially am I grateful for the portrait of the beautiful, beautiful maiden. Please thank her from me, if not for sending it, at least for so felicitously sitting for it. It makes me jump the torrent of the years and reconstruct from her fine features the mythological past—a still tenderer youth than her present youth. (I ought to be able to mean my own; but I can't manage it—her profile won't help me to that.) I envy you and your wife her company and I rejoice for you in her presence. I rejoice for myself, my dear Howells, about your so delicate words to me in regard to a bit of recent work. They go to my heart—they go perhaps still straighter to my head! I am so utterly lonely here—on the "literary plane"—that it is the strangest as well as the sweetest sensation to be conscious in the boundless void—the dim desert sands—of any human approach at all or any kindly speech. Therefore please be very affectionately thanked.—All this while I never see anything that you yourself have lately flowered with—I mean the volumes that you freehandedly scatter. I console myself with believing that one or two of your last serial fictions are not volumes yet. Please hold them not back from soon becoming so. I see you are drawing a longish bow in the Cosmopolitan—but I only read you when I can sit down to a continuous feast and all the courses. You asked me in your penultimate—I am talking now of your early-in-the-winter letter—if I should object to being made a feature of your composed reminiscences. To which I reply that I only wish that I could enrich them better. I won't pretend that I like being written about—the sight of my own name on a printed page makes me as ill (and the sensibility increases strangely with time) as that of one of my creations makes me well. I have a morbid passion for personal privacy and a standing quarrel with the blundering publicities of the age. I wince even at eulogy, and I wither (for exactly 2 minutes and 1/2) at any qualification of adulation. But on the other hand I like, I love, to be remembered by you and I surrender myself to your discretion. I hope your winter, and Mrs. Howells' and the fairest of daughters's, is rich and full and sane. How you must miss the Boy. I go abroad soon and hope to see him in Paris. When do you do the same? Yours always, my dear Howells,

HENRY JAMES.