To Miss Grace Norton.

Sept. 1, 1875.

Among illusions, not “my own idiosyncracies,” is one arising from not clearly dividing associated accidents from essential characters, when in the synthetic operations of imagination we have joined them together, — as what we are saying or have said to a friend, on the one hand, with their personal traits and individual characters, on the other. Imagination, the so- (mis)called faculty, the “faculty divine,” is distinguished from common powers of the sort by an instinctive apprehension of what truly and essentially belongs to its objects, which, in common minds, only reflective comparison could separate from accidents; and this power so guides invention that the

poem is recognized as a true representation by others besides the poet; but every one other than the ideally perfect poet is under the illusion that the thoughts and interests between the lines of his own composition are conveyed by them more or less distinctly to his readers; and this illusion obtains most in letters, since correspondents are never to themselves what they seem to us. Indeed, one of the charms of intercourse is in the riddles thus presented. Discussion is often not so much for the sake of truth or decision as for the discovery of individual traits and causes, infinitely various, and the reading of these riddles. . . .

Our solicitude about posthumous reputation is just as rational, when truly disinterested, as about a contemporary one. One’s reputation is a trust to keep and transmit, if it aspires to be more than a claim to present advantage; and solicitude about its future is not, therefore, any thing different or less noble than one’s present devotion to its excellence. To be sure, it makes no difference to the dead what is thought of them, or into what hands their names and fames may fall; but it makes a vast difference to the living, — mere idealists though they all are, — who act with reference to the future, the permanent, and the universal. It is a present sense of a fitness for which we are now responsible, rather than any future sense, which is concerned.

It is a great advantage in spoken words that the impress of them in the world is for the most part a sound vanishing in the air, the vehicle only, not the storehouse, of thoughts incorporated in the mind or becoming the thoughts of another, or at best the momentary embodiment of social sympathies. If phonantographs were common, would they not be worse than weeds, — dirt, indeed, which we would expel furiously? And written words are rivets and chains by which our freedom is fettered, our moods pinioned, and our Protean lives set in false because fixed postures. . . .

I haven’t yet read Professor Clifford’s article, but do not recognize in his scepticism, as you quote it, a novelty in philosophical opinions. It is very like that of the very ancient pre- Socratic sceptics, but looser in thought than a well-trained modern thinker ought to be. The truths of geometry and mechanics are abstract or conditional truths, not true at all as descriptions of what actually is or ever has been, except by the rarest accident, since the conditions supposed in them, like drawing a perfect circle or straight line, or the postulates demanded in their enunciation, are never exactly realized. If Mr. Clifford supposes, or thinks it legitimate to suppose, that there was ever a time when an infinite intelligence could not have comprehended the actual orders of the world in complex formulae, involving the abstract truths of geometry and mechanics, as we now know them, or would have found it more impossible than now, he surrenders the whole ground of scientific speculation on the subject. He needed not have been so particular in designating the superseded laws, but might as well have admitted miracle at once into his speculation, as the orthodox do,—and for the unseen present as well as for the unrecorded past. If one speculates in science at all, it must be from some grounds; but it is not necessary to assert dogmatically that these are indefeasible. Science does not deal with the unconditionally possible or impossible, or with what the orthodox call “the possible with God,” but follows out consequences from what is known, surrendering speculation rather than these grounds. To come in conclusion to the admission of miracle is a wasted journey; why not admit it at the start? A law that is good for a moment is good for infinite time, unless it be presumably — on the ground of higher laws, not of mere uncertainty — an alterable law.

I had, a month or more ago, a hot dispute with ----- about Stuart Mill’s position on this very subject, which he conceived to be the same as Clifford’s. Dr. ----- took sides

with me, in distinguishing between Mill’s doctrine, that inconceivability in the negative is not a legitimate proof of absolute truth of fact, — and the doctrine of Clifford, as I understood and still understand it, viz.: that this test could be disregarded in a scientific speculation, in rational inference, — as if reason had not its laws. Confusion may not have any laws, perhaps, or any ascertainable ones. -----, after calling Mill and his doctrine many hard names, had to admit that this distinction noted an important difference.

I stayed in Northampton even longer than I intended when I wrote. It was one of my excitements to plan every day for going the next, though this grew tiresome after I was reduced to complete sedateness, and the weather got a little cooler. I reached Cambridge on Monday evening. The proofs of my long-delayed article on Darwinism had been waiting for me here a week, and the publication was thereby still more delayed. I am thinking a little of a short visit to Mr. Thayer at Mount Desert.

This visit to Mount Desert he never made. On September 2, he wrote to me: “Think of my staying at Northampton for a fortnight in August! I found, on returning, a card from William Ware, a fortnight old, calling on me to join him in the journey to Mount Desert. ... If I do not get from you any discouragement, I propose to go down by the Bangor boat on Tuesday next, the 7th.” On Tuesday, he had packed his bag for the journey, but sat talking in his room until it was so late that it would require some exertion to reach the boat in time; whereupon, much according to a common habit with him, he concluded not to go. We, at the other end, knowing nothing of this, expected him, and when he did not come still looked for him by the next arrival. In a few days, however, instead of welcoming my friend, I opened the Boston paper to read of his sudden death; and the date of the paper was the day of his funeral.

I cannot better tell the details of his death than by quoting from a letter of this same date, in which my kind friend, William Ware, first told them to me: —

“Boston, [Tuesday], Sept. 14, 1875.

“You will, I suppose, before this reaches you, have learned all that is to be told about Chauncey’s death. It so happened that I myself heard of it only last night. I went early this morning to Cambridge, but, as I learned from Mr. James, Mr. Henry James. ⁹¹ he had already been taken to Northampton. His brother came down yesterday, and I presume the funeral will take place there to-day. Except St. John Green and Hooper, whom I have not seen, no one of his friends was in Cambridge but Mr. James; he went at once to the house on Sunday morning, but it was too late. It seems that his landlady found him sitting over his writing, with the gas still burning, at some late hour on Sunday morning, and was leaving him undisturbed, thinking he had fallen asleep. A sound of distress attracted her attention; and, finding him insensible, she sent at once for Dr. Driver, near by. He arrived immediately, and said at once that there had been some kind of attack, and that another was coming on. This was indeed the case. They laid him on his bed, but before Dr. Wyman, who had been sent for, could arrive, he was gone. The impression seems to be that the first attack must have been early in the evening.

“He had been very bright and well, and there was nothing to give warning that all was not right with him. Mr. James said that about a week ago he spent an evening at his house, and he had never known him more delightful, —talking in his best vein, not about things and ideas but about people, giving astonishingly minute characterizations of them. Innocent, mild, kindly, sympathetic, pure-minded,—these were the

words Mr. James used about him; and, in speaking of his relations at the Nortons and his admiration of Miss Jane, he quoted his saying that he would rather have her personal approbation than all the fame of this country and Europe. It was a great satisfaction to hear Mr. James’s appreciative talk, and to have all his lovely and amiable ways brought up; and I could not but hope that Mr. James was mistaken, of late at least, in thinking that he had been so miserably unhappy. I had hoped that for the last year or two things had been less difficult with him. He has certainly seemed, as I have seen him, quiet and serene. . . . Mr. James said that his face was perfectly white and very noble to look at.”

On the night before he died, he was perfectly well, and stood in the door-way talking cheerfully and kindly with his landlady (the daughter of Mary Walker), and her colored friend, Mrs. Jacobs, with whom he had boarded. This was at about ten o’clock on Saturday evening, September 11. The college vacation was not yet over, and most of his friends were away; even his chum, Mr. Emery, was absent for the Sunday. The apartments consisted of two bed-rooms and a common study; on Sunday morning, at about seven o’clock, he was found in his study in the manner which is described in Professor Ware’s letter; and he died in half an hour, with no sign of consciousness, the physician and his friend Mr. Green being present. No definite cause could be assigned for this sudden death, even after a post-mortem examination. The examination was made by Dr. Thomas Dwight, of Boston. Dr. Dwight informs me that the membranes of the brain were much congested, and there were appearances which indicated that a certain amount of congestion had existed for some time; but the cause of death was not ascertained. He adds: “The brain weighed fifty-three and a half ounces, which is above the average, but not remarkable. The frontal portion was uncommonly developed. In studying the arrangement of the convolutions, I found an anomaly, of which there was at the time but one instance recorded in literature; namely, a bridge of brain tissue extending over one of the chief fissures, that of Rolando. Whether it is of any real significance, our knowledge does not permit us to say, but it was certainly remarkable. . . . The anomaly was observed in the brain of a Dr. Fuchs, who was a clinical professor at Göttingen. He was, of course, an educated and intelligent man, but I am not aware that he was in any way remarkable. The case was described by Rudolf Wagner, in a work of which I think the title is Vorstudien zu einer wissenschaftlichen Morphologie und Physiologie des Menschlichen Gehirns. It is in two thin quarto volumes, and contains good plates: it is at the Boston Public Library. Hetchl, of Vienna, in the Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, of October 13, 1877, describes six additional cases which he has observed, and alludes to two by Teré, one of which he considers doubtful. The arrangement of the convolutions in the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain of Mr. Wright was remarkably simple.” ⁹²

He was taken to Northampton on Monday. But few persons from a distance were able to be present at the funeral on the next day; yet his faithful and dear friends, Mr. Norton, at Ashfield, and Mrs. Lesley, at Magnolia, had learned of it in time to come. He was laid in his father’s tomb, in the old graveyard where so many of his ancestors for two hundred years had been buried. The tomb is by the roadside, looking over the great meadow, — that reaches round to his father’s door, a mile away, — and across the distant Connecticut, to the long, even brim of the Pelham hills that bound the eastern horizon. It is the same large and tranquil scene which lay before his eyes when they first opened upon this world of wonders.