Wm to H'ry, Feb. 4, 1910. Age: 68

W^m learns from H'ry's secretary that H'ry is fine:

"We are thrilled by a note from Miss Bosanquet, just arriving..., telling us that Dr. Skinner says there is 'no cause for anxiety, & that you are much better' -- this to us who didn't know that you were ill, & without telling the nature of the complaint!...Meanwhile I will hope for the best -- there evidently has been no funeral!"

Bosanquet went on to write a memoir about her days working for H'ry, Henry James at Work.

Theodora Bosanquet

Wm to H'ry, Jan. 7, 1910. Age: 67

W^m sits for another portrait:

"Bay Emmett returns next week to put the finishing touches to my portrait.  I hope they will make it 'good' -- for so far I don't like it much."

H'ry to Wm, Oct. 31, 1909. Age: 66

W^m was never able to enjoy H'ry's most ambitious books; not true the reverse, as H'ry gives a surprisingly intimate read to W^m's The Meaning of Truth:

"I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant & brilliant, & am lost in admiration of your wealth & power.  I palpitate as you make out your case,...as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now....I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make everything for your critics.  Clearly you are winning a great battle & great will be your fame."

Wm to H'ry, Oct. 9, 1909. Age: 67

W^m writes from Flume House in the White Mountains:

"I think it is the finest season for colour that has ever been.  A sort of chromatic frenzy, as if fireworks, jewelry, rainbows, glitter, could go no farther."

H'ry to Wm, July 18, 1909. Age: 66

And W^m wasn't the only one interested of late in old Lives...

"Awfully interesting what you tell me of Plutarch -- whom I reopened -- with extreme interest, to the extent of 3 or 4 Greek Lives -- a year or two ago; not having looking into him since old Newport days."

Wm to H'ry, June 23, 1909. Age: 67

A little more than a year before his death, W^m is still acquainting himself with the ancient past:

"I have just finished 3 vols. of Plutarch's lives -- great stuff to read, more everlasting human business, more 'rammed with life' than any book I know."

Plutarch

Wm to H'ry, Feb. 13, 1909. Age: 67

W^m suspects that letter-writing might be at the heart of H'ry's heart problems:

"But moderate your efforts in other ways!  Write little eigenhändig, and write shorter letters than you habitually do!  No need of writing at all to younger members of this family.  I find the act of writing to be a great tax."

"Eigenhändig" means, I believe, by hand.

H'ry to Wm, Feb. 5, 1909. Age 65

False alarm -- the cure was worse than the disease:

"I am feeling so infinitely & promptly better that I blush for the depressed letter that I wrote to you Tuesday last....I was simply sickined for 48 hours by Skinner's drugs -- 'tonics,' whiskeys, liquor-brandies & the like (which he doesn't in the least mind one's not taking however) -- & and I have qute cleared it with him that I take nothing."

The following year, H'ry's symptoms will return again, and it won't appear to be a false alarm this time.

Wm to H'ry. Feb. 3, 1909. Age: 65

Is this the beginning of the end?

"My dear William. I am making up my mind to tell you, with every precaution, that my 'pectoral' trouble has of late been giving ou ome rather worrying heart-symptoms....It was only 11 or 12 days ago that my consciousness -- rather uncomfortable, ever since you left England -- became rather suddenly aggravated, in respect to panting, gasping, getting generally out of breath in respect to minor efforts &...the past 6 years of Fletcherizing -- with no shadow or strain  or overdoing -- it was in a manner the result of my gradual but more & more increasing cessation of 'exercise.'"

Wm to H'ry, Jan. 24, 1909. Age: 67

Perhaps an example of why the James family wanted many of the brothers' letters burned:

"I also read your article on C[harles]. E[liot]. N[orton]., in the Burlington, with great gusto.  He has been so magnified by everyone here...that I began to wonder if I had been stone-blind to his greatness, and the way in which you subtly killed him was inimitable.  But only the few will understand the neatness."

Charles Eliot Norton in 1903

Wm to H'ry, Jan. 24, 1909. Age: 67

I'll second this observation, from W^m to H'ry:

"I have just written 'contents & 'Index' to my Oxford lectures, (you may thank your stars that the kind of books you write require no indexes)..."

Wm to H'ry, Dec. 19, 1908. Age: 66

W^m rises early to catch an dawn:

"I write this at 6:³⁰, in the library which the blessed hard coal fir has kept warm all night long.  The night has been still, thermometer 20, and the dawn is breaking in a pure red line behind Grace Norton's House, into a sky empty save for a big morning star and the crescent of the waning moon."

W^m's Cambridge library

H'ry to Wm, Nov. 2, 1908. Age: 65

H'ry offers an eloquent lament for the hurried public age:

"But of the challenges from London the end seems never.  Mrs [Edith] Wharton arrives on the 5^th returning -- from the antipodes -- at the end of [only] three months." 

A very early portrait od H'ry's long time friend, Edith Wharton.

Wm to H'ry, Oct. 21, 1908. Age:66

W^m tries to capture a New England autumn in words:

"The smoky haze, the windless heat, the litter of the leaves on the ground in their rich colors, with enough remaining on the trees to make the whole scene red and yellow, the penury & shabbiness of everything human, the delicate emaciated morbidness, and feminine secretness of all nature's effects was so pathetic!"

Wm to H'ry, Sept. 1, 1908. Age: 66

W^m, in Bruges, appreciates the Memlings in their gallery and the presentation of the art itself:

"We were especially delighted byt the Memling's at St Jean Hospital.  That's the way the museums of the future will show pictures, innumerable rooms, few in a room and full light."

The St. Jean Hospital, Bruges

Sacra Conversazione with Saints John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Catherine of Alexandria, and Barbara

                                                                                      Hans Memling

Wm to H'ry, June 3, 1908. Age: 66

W^m hosts a famous doctor:

"Richard Cabot M.D., and his wife are here he one of the most orignal minds & characters in Boston, and very good, altho' he hates my philosophy....He is really in spite of his contemptible appearance -- perhaps because of it -- a great moral force."

Dr. Richard Cabot

H'ry to Wm, May 3, 1908. Age: 65

H'ry sits for a portrait:

"I sit & sit, too, to Blanche -- probably to my honour & his, alike."

Jacques-Emile Blanche, Henry James, 1908

Wm to H'ry, April 29, 1908. Age: 66

W^m, rested on his journey, takes aim at Hegel:

"I have been sleeping like a top, and feel in good fighting trim again eager for the scalp of the Absolute.  My lectures will put his wretched clerical defenders on the defensive."

W^m, c. 1905-1910

Wm to H'ry, April 28, 1908. Age: 66

W^m did finish his lectures before sailing on the R.M.S. Invernia:

"We have had a good voyage strong westerly winds, and only one day of gale -- ultra comfortable ship, and almost no sociability, so we both feel quite rested and fit.  The security of having one's lectures practically all written out is tremenjus.  How different would be my state of mind were they not."

Wm to H'ry, April 15, 1908. Age: 66

W^m's writing process was never smooth:

"The fact is I've been trying to compose the accursed lectures in a state of abominable brain fatigue -- a race between myself & time.  I've got six now done out of the eight, so I'm safe, but sorry that the infernal nervous condition that with me always accompanies literary production, must continue at Oxford, & add itself to other fatigues -- a fixed habit of wakefulness, etc."

Wm to H'ry, Nov. 30, 1907. Age: 65

W^m commits to the Oxford lectures that will become A Pluralistic Universe:

"Lecturing is profoundly odious to me, and the sociability will doubtless be excessive and fatiguing, but I dimly see my way to another little book which should be useful...so I make the venture."

H'ry to Wm, Nov. 13, 1907. Age: 64

H'ry delivers the most back-handed of introductions, ever:

"A man I don't particularly know...though I have known a little of him for some years, one C. Lewis Hind, a London journalist, ex-editor of The Academy and one thing or another, has written to tell me that you are the one person in America he wants utterly most to see during a short stay....He doesn't ask me for a letter, and I wouldn't give it to him if he did, for I used to think him rather a donkey...But he is a perfectly decent, respectable, and I believe amiable man...so that if he comes along and makes you a sign, please understand that I have written you this explanatory, but not urgent or insistent word."

H'ry to Wm, Oct. 17, 1907. Age: 64

H'ry describes writing the prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels, soon to be published:

"The prefaces are very difficult to make right, absolutely and utterly, as they supremely have to be; but they are so right, so far, that the Scribners, pleased with them to the extent quite -- for publishers -- of giving themselves away -- pronounce them 'absolutely unique'!"

H'ry wrote a 7,000-word preface for each volume.

H'ry to Wm, May 31, 1907. Age: 64

Advised not to respond to W^m's criticisms, H'ry promises one anyway:

"You shall have none the less, after a little more patience, a reply to your so rich & luminous reflections on my Book -- a reply almost as interesting as, & far more annihilating than, your letter itself."

Wm to H'ry, May 4, 1907. Age: 65

W^m reflects on an academic career:

"As a 'professor' I always felt myself a sham, with its chief duties being a walking encyclopedia of erudition.  I am now at liberty to be a reality, and the comfort is unspeakable -- literally unspeakable, to be my own man, after 35 years of being owned by others.  I can now live for the truth pure and simple, instead of for truth accommodated to the most unheard-of requirements set by others."

Wm to H'ry, May 4, 1907. Age: 65

W^m gives H'ry an out, after his rant:

"For God's sake don't answer these remarks, which (as Uncle Howard used to say of Father's writings) are but the peristaltic belchings of my own crabbed organism."

Wm to H'ry, May 4, 1907. Age: 65

W^m both admires and frets over H'ry's prose style:

"And the complication of inuendo and associative reference on the enormous scale to which you give way to it, does so build out the matter for the reader that the result is to solidify by the mere bulk of the process, the like perception from which he has to start.  As air, by dint of its volume will weigh ike a corporeal body; so his poor little initial assessment swathed in this gigantic envelopment of suggestive atmosphere, grows like a germ into something vastly bigger and more substantial...In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread & neglected."

H'ry to Wm, April 30, 1907. Age: 64

H'ry comments on the state of France during the process of secularization in the wake of the Dreyfuss affair:

"They should be so happy -- that's the lesson of their country -- & they have nothing but hate in their hearts."

Wm to H'ry, Feb. 14, 1907. Age: 65

Even retirement has not saved W^m from the most onerous of tasks:

"I must now go to a 'department meeting.'"

Wm to H'ry, Feb. 14, 1907. Age: 65

W^m reflects on a New York City changed since his Washington Square youth:

"The first impression of N.Y., if you stay there not more than 36 hours, which has been my limit for 20 years past, is one of repulsion at the clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions.  But this time, installed as I was at the Harvard Club (44th St) in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated mit, & found it simply magnificent."

The Harvard Club (yeah, I think I'd find it magnifient too...)

Wm to H'ry, Dec. 9, 1906. Age: 64

After many threats to retire, W^m finally does look forward to the literal end of his tenure at Harvard:

"I have only 5 more weeks of College lectures and then free forever!"

He died four and a half years later.