To Miss Jane Norton.

Cambridge, June 19, 1873.

During the winter and spring, I had been unusually well, and part of the time deeply absorbed in one of my essays. I think, however, that I never had a bluer day than that of my landing last November in New York. The accounts given by friends who saw him after landing in New York, and for some days afterwards, fully confirm the impression which this letter gives of the depression which attended the first hours of his return home. ⁷⁰ I became then and there an undoubting convert to the climate theory of the difference between America and Europe, or at least America and England. As our ship steamed up New York harbor in the bleak, early morning, — depressed by the raw, icy air, I

was homesick for London, and would willingly have plunged back into its worst winter fogs, confident that I should not have found them worse than the exasperating, nerve-tormenting — otherwise-called exhilarating, stimulating — weather of our natal land. I believe my nerves to be natives of a foggy climate. It may have been, in part, the news of the Boston fire, which was the first tidings of home that came to us from the shore; except the climate, of which I was aware when nearly a day’s sailing from land, — a certain look and feeling in the air and sky, which you must have experienced. A season’s absence from their influence seemed to increase my susceptibility to them, though I am now, I believe, reacclimated. Our over-praised days in June, of which lately you must have had perfect specimens in Ashfield, — are they not like too large draughts of fragrant or sparkling wine? When well, one wakes in the morning fresh and invigorated, but soon becomes eager and excited by the overpowering day; and before noon one is ready to succumb to its stimulation, — that is, if one has nerves.

I had it in mind all winter to draw a letter from you about what you were seeing and doing in London; but much writing of another sort — not much, after all, yet enough for the usual effect — kept me from turning to the pen with any impulse of spontaneity such as inspires letters, or should do it. I see in Mr. Stephen’s letter to the “Nation” that Mr. Mill was in London a short time before his death. I think Mr. Stephen’s personal recollections A letter by Mr. Leslie Stephen on “The Late Stuart Mill,” in the “Nation,” for June 5, 1873 (Vol. XVI. p. 382). ⁷¹ of him quite interesting; yet I do not know whether I really regret not seeing him last fall. I somehow never had the kind of interest in the personality of men whom I have admired for their works that many have, or at least never any strong desire to join my personality to theirs. It is not like seeing more nearly

and intimately the man you have come to know, but is more like seeing his second, his intimate friend, his responsible agent, or even his scribe; though, no doubt, in Mr. Mill’s case, I should have been charmed by the social side of the author.

I was a good deal struck with Mr. Stephen’s account of Mill’s habits of rapid writing and reservation of his thought till it was ripe for rapid utterance, and of his habit of walking great distances. Mr. Stephen had said: “It was his habit, I believe, to have every thing closely arranged in his head before putting any thing on paper. The actual writing was, therefore, extremely rapid. . . . Like some other distinguished writers, he was fond of taking long walks, during which his reflections were gradually moulded into a form fit for expression. Within the last year or two, he was still equal to doing thirty or forty miles a day without excessive fatigue.” ⁷² The fact, not mentioned in this letter, that Mill was a skilful botanist, may account, in part, for this habit; but doubtless his walks were the occasion of many a profound meditation. I can imagine him in his rambles, alternately detecting a fallacy in metaphysics and enjoying a new plant. In fact, some of the subtlest points in his writings, which I have passed lightly and listlessly over in reading, have come to me in their full force while walking. Think of any one’s walking in America thirty or forty miles in a day without inconvenience! A walk of ten miles here is almost a feat for me, and five a considerable effort, though in London I made nothing of five. Muscular sensibility seems with us to take the place of muscular activity. The American appears to prefer a constrained attitude — his feet above his head — to a vigorous exertion of his muscles with his feet on the ground; and when he moves he prefers to fly, getting over the ground and the movement as expeditiously as possible. He may, with his instincts and nerves, ultimately develop wings, like a bat, and rest, hanging entirely by his heels, like that nervous animal, — a near relation, by the way, zoologically, to the human species.

It is getting very late, and I must reserve the rest of this letter for to-morrow. I spent the first few hours of this evening in a lively discussion with ----- on the nature and significance of hallucinations. Whether to-morrow I shall give you the result of this talk, or catechise you on less abstruse matters, will depend on the mood of Spontaneity, that omnipotent but now sleepy divinity of the faithful letter-writer. Good-night.

Morning of Class Day, and no rain yet, nor sign of any. The traditions of the day, as well as the predictions of the weather office, are against hope. Meantime, the grass in Cambridge is dying, looking now as it sometimes does in August, in spite of artificial showers which one sees everywhere from hydrants and hose.

I am this morning, more than ever, provoked with myself for having missed “the much you had to tell, of all sorts of things.” Half an hour’s talk, — the contents of how many letters might have been compressed into it! . . .

I can well believe that coming home, after so long and in some respects grievous an absence, must have been a very sad, yet, by turns, a joyous experience. Sorrow, springing from tender regards of home, kindred, or friends, is not an emotion of so unmixed a pain that we shun the thoughts that inspire it, or seek to repress them. Imaginations of a painful and pleasurable kind alternate in this emotion, — offset and heighten each other. We turn from one to the other, from the depression of deprivation or loss, past or present, to the contemplation of worths remaining or restored to us, or still retaining an inward reality for us. Sorrow is a mixture having all the substance or weight of the pleasures and pains that compose it, but has the special qualities of neither. It is a chemical union of them, in which these qualities are neutralized, but in which weights are combined. Feeling has a substance, a depth, a

weight with the will, which is not in its character, either as a pleasure or pain; but it is none the less a volatile salt of life, and is dissipated in time.

I hope the exertions and excitements of getting once again settled in your Ashfield home will not be found to have drawn too largely on the strength of any one of you. One feels such expenditures only some time after they have been incurred. But I imagine you, though resting, still preoccupied in gathering up old threads of association, bridging over, contrasting, or blotting out much of the interests and incidents of the long interval, — seeing, not without regret, that which has been so real fade into a dream.

I have been a good deal interested in England for a little time lately, —the England of the past and the present, — while reading M. Taine’s graphic criticisms and interesting theories of English literature. His style gives the impression, which I have heard expressed, of his writing on a theory and adapting his observations to it. But it strikes me as a well-considered theory, founded on much previous sagacious observation, though the only part of his book which I feel quite competent to judge, his criticisms of Mill and the “Experience Philosophy,”— as well as those on the same subject in his later work on “Intelligence,” — seems to me weak. In these criticisms, he has obviously reached beyond the length of his tether, though he may be still quite sound in his views of English imagination, and its causes and developments.

Did you see any thing of Mr. Darwin last winter? I have heard nothing from or about him, except a statement in the newspapers last month that he was in Paris. This seemed to indicate unusual health and vigor in him. I did not send him my last essay in the “North American;” Evolution of Self-Consciousness: North American Review, April 1873; Philosophical Discussions, p. 199. ⁷³ for I preferred that he should be led, if at all, by his own interest in the subject to read it.

Metaphysics is not his forte; and I feared to bore him, or at least desired not to compel from him either a judgment or a confession. I ought to have waited, and expanded the subject into a book, as ---- suggested to me last fall in London, instead of publishing the sketch, which the article really is. But the editor of the “Review” demanded it, and I weakly gave it to him.