An Adirondack Friendship: Letters of William James

I

IN William James there was always the ‘double pull,’the Zwiespalt, with which his letters were filled on his return from his frequent journeys to Europe. He was at once lover of the American wilds and also, fundamentally, the cosmopolitan, the lover of Europe, the restless traveler, the keen and sympathetic observer. It was an essential characteristic of his own individualism and insistence upon the unique quality of every individual life that he should turn upon each nation, each country, each person he met, that humane yet penetrating eye.

The joys of foreign travel Mr. James often encouraged his young correspondent, Pauline Goldmark, to seek — Alpine heights, the English countryside, or, it might be, the satisfaction of the historic sense, so difficult to capture in the abstract, so vivid in the presence of ancient beauty. He compared impressions, and in a phrase or a page evoked the foreign scene and its particular flavor.

Thus, for instance, in some consecutive letters of 1908 written from abroad: —

MARIEMONT, EDGBASTON, May 31, ’08
PAOLINA MIA — Yesterday morning, coming down stairs at Oxford, I found your letter from Athens and the steamer lying on the hall table and have had it all to myself. Beautiful letter, showing how you too have felt ‘ the wonder that was Greece.’ How many different ways of being wondrous in this world! In some respects the Athenians were like Iroquois, in some like Parisians of today, in others like their sole selves — you can’t escape them. They are at the heart of all our European culture, but you must see their country to imagine them. How I wish I might have been with you there for 24 hours! You don’t tell me where you lodged, or by what route you are making for Naples, or any other sordid detail. No matter — I don’t deserve to know so much. I am glad you ’re going to Rome, which of all places in Europe is the one I’d rather spend a winter in again. Stay there as long as the (probable) heat will let you, and drink deep draughts of the wide horizontal perspectives, topographic, moral and historic. Read Machiavelli’s Prince and Life of Castracani to give you the spirit of the Renaissance. I am spending 36 hours with Oliver Lodge, Alice being at Harrow. Tomorrow to London and back to Oxford on Tuesday for another week of unspeakable social fatigue. I have got thru my lectures, and love Oxford, both place, people, and institutions; but I started on my last legs and am tired as I have seldom been, with the unceasing ‘sociability’ required. I long for the country. I’ve grown fearfully old in the past year, except ‘philosophically,’ where I still keep young, but I can’t keep pace with your strong young life at all any more, and you do well to drop me out of your calculations. I’m out of the running in so many ways that I can only figure as a valetudinarian in the eyes of people like yourself, God bless you. But, ironically enough, I am more and more of an ‘authority ’!! We go in 10 days to the Cotswold hills and on the 23rd to Durham for another honorary degree — drat it all. If my extreme fatigue continues I shall make tracks for home to get my back under a pine tree with no social complications, and recover.

Keep us informed of your movements. Harry arrived 3 days ago, Peg arrives about July 1st.

The beauty and wholesomeness of this England are immense, and Oxford, now that I have been part of the machine for a month, seems familiar and democratic. Goodbye! Heaven bless you, dear Pauline — Your affectionate W. J.

ULLSWATER HOTEL, PATTERDALE. July 2, ’08.
Your letter, beloved Pauline, greeted me on my arrival here three hours ago, just as I had settled again into the unhealthy conviction that to communicate with me was more trouble to you than it seemed worth. Pardon the injurious thought. This letter, earthquake, photograph and all show you to be writing con amore and I thank you from my heart. All I really needed was to know your whereabouts, present, and future so far as that was fixed. I supposed the Rome address, which was all you had given me, to be long since obsolete, on account of heat; but how mistaken I was, since you are returning thither, and D. S. M. is actually installed there! So I send this also to Rome with some confidence that it will get you. Surely one has to stay indoors most of the day in Rome at this season, which will account for Miller’s doing so much ‘work.’ Moreover when you are as old as M. and me, you will probably find that a bit of the habitual work daily — reading is enough — gives you a better moral digestion for all the sightseeing and lying waste. How I do wish that I could be in Italy alongside of you now, now or any time! You could do me so much good, and your ardor of enjoyment of the country, the town, and the folk would warm up my cold soul. I might even learn to speak Italian by conversing in that tongue with you. But I fear that you’d find me betraying the coldness of my soul by complaining of the heat of my body — a most unworthy attitude to strike. Dear Paolina, never, never think of whether your body is hot or cold, live in the objective world, above such miserable considerations. . . .
I have been riding about on stage coaches for five days past, but the hills are so treeless that one gets little shade, and the sun’s glare is tremendous. It is a lovely country, however, for pedestrianizing in cooler weather. Mountains and valleys compressed together as in the Adirondacks, great reaches of pink and green hillside and lovely lakes, the higher parts quite fully Alpine in character but for the fact that no snow mountains form the distant background. A strong and noble region, well worthy of one’s life-long devotion, if you were a Briton. And on the whole what a magnificent land and race is this Britain. Every thing about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U. S. — with but few exceptions, I imagine. And the equilibrium is so well achieved, and the human tone so cheery, blythe and manly! And the manners so delightfully good. Not one unwholesome looking man or woman does one meet for 250 that one meets in America. Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it, and thou in 22nd St and I in Irving St must do our respective strokes, which after 1000 years will help to have made the glorious collective resultant. Meanwhile, as my brother H. once wrote, thank God for a world that holds so rich an England, so rare an Italy! ... A breeze has risen on the Lake which is spread out before the ‘Smoking room’ window at which I write, and is very grateful. The lake much resembles Lake George. Your ever grateful and loving W. J.

ULLSWATER HOTEL, PATTERDALE. July 3, ’08, 9.30 A.M.
DEAR PAULINE, My pen ran off yesterday upon Anglicanism and other abstractions without deigning to deal with your dear concrete letter, which gives me such an impression of your active healthy nature and susceptibility to happiness. . . .
You ask about Casentino and the Val Verna: I forget all names, but imagine that you mean the country about Assisi with wh. St. F. had so much to do. I have been there, and been immensely impressed, both with the landscape and the unique legendary history. The strange thing was the quick success of the good F.’s enterprise.
But how can our ideas of strangeness be applied to a time when the earth and the sky were all mixed up together, and we ourselves, God, Christ, the devil and the angels formed one vividly and immediately present little family circle? Vivid as a camera picture, and nothing in it more than a mile off, or a year away! I was particularly struck with that little private sanctuary of F., away up on the mountain side, with everything so tiny and its little bed of penance hollowed in the rock. The lair of the wild beast, indeed, and that beast the Saint!
I hope that on your way from Siena to Rome you will have stopped at Orvieto, if you have n’t been there already, as you probably have. Not only the church but the town ‘took’ me immensely when I was there 3 years ago. The fierce little poor people’s houses, with their outside stairs, and the masonry binding things with such style in its irregularity. Was that your own photo of the Greek goatherd? If so, I applaud; and wish you may have snapped off some of the little dwellings on the hill slopes at Orvieto.
Here, the heat continues and a misty glare envelops the mountains. I shall pass a quiet day. Unfortunately I’ve already been recognized by some Durham people, but as they have a ‘motor,’ I shall perhaps get some compensation. How I wish that you might have been of our party at Durham. Both the Cathedral and castle were so impressive. As for Oxford, the beauty is endless. One must live there a month to fathom its uniqueness. There never ought to be a second one attempted in this world.
Ah Pauline, Pauline. God bless you! Your W. J.

ULLSWATER HOTEL, July 5th, 9.30 A.M.
DEAR PAULINE,
Well! I have got off three successive letters to you anyhow, and that part of my life at least can’t be undone! Here goes for a fourth, and tho’ I fear that you may flinch from the persecution, it makes me feel temporarily quite young again, — not more than 34 years old, or 34 and a half, to find that I can keep it up so well. A cool and rainy day, with the mountains mostly hid by clouds. Not unbecoming to the region, more so in fact than the cloudless heat glare. The friendly Squances took me out again yesterday afternoon for a 40 miles ride in their automobile which he drives very skilfully down the steep hills — Ullswater, Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside — in fact the cream of the district, unrolling itself successively under the becoming cloudy sky.
Great uplifted moorlands and almost tropically embowered roadsides alternated in this drive, and the richest thing in the latter way was ‘Fox Howe,’ the house which Dr. Arnold (of Rugby) built on a bit of land selected by ‘Mr.’ Wordsworth (and well selected) for the view, and died almost immediately after. His children have lived there more or less ever since, and the septuagenarian Miss Arnold, who received us, proved a very jolly old girl — a friend of Miss Squance. How I should have liked you to see the country, so much of it at once! It is really a wonderful little country for strength and compressed variety — the hills all look much higher than they really are. England has nice things, natural as well as human, within her limits. . . .
If you want some good Italian reading, try to get Settembrini’s memoirs, a Neapolitan of the revolutionary time, with the most extraordinary Italian grace of nature piercing through his horrible recital of suffering. Massimo d’Azeglio’s memoirs I suppose you know — they exist in English. . . .
I suppose that you are tempted towards Tyrol, to do some mountain scaling. The Salters enjoyed their walking in the Austrian Tyrol more than any part of their year abroad, and after Rome you must long to get the breath of the Scipio’s sepulchres out of your lungs. . . .
If I could obey my real impulse, I would go home this month and spend the rest of my summer at the Putnams’. Goodbye, Pauline, goodbye. A our W. J.

Atmosphere, light, perspective never more subtly reproduced than in a single paragraph in a letter from Edinburgh, engage the artist who was never lost in William James. (Had he not studied painting under Hunt in his youth before turning to the study of medicine?)

I think your party did n’t come to Scotland [he writes]. Edinburgh and the country round about are grossartig, as noble and strong as any city in the world, I fancy. Today is sunny (for a wonder), and Alice, Harry and Peggy have gone to the Trossachs. The atmospheric effects in the town are extraordinary, vistas receding in plane after plane of aerial perspective, in an air full of delicate aqueous vapour, silvery brown smoke, and ancient decayed sunshine held in solution in it, so that it figures as a bodily object of the most exquisite sort. But let me not Ruskinize!

II

Circumstances had early made of William James a citizen of the world, who had lived much abroad. Yet such were his constitutional restlessness and what has been called ‘the perversity which was a fascinating trait in his character’ that he was seldom content to settle down for long. In spite of regularly recurring visits to Europe, he came to feel that a long sojourn there uprooted him from America and American life. That difficulty of readjustment which we must all experience in greater or less degree on returning from the older order of civilization, with all its wealth of historic association, was particularly marked in Mr. James. In his later years it was aggravated by his illness and necessary relinquishments of activity. Yet as early as 1894 he was writing to Carl Stumpf: —

One should not be a cosmopolitan, one’s soul becomes ‘disintegrated,’ as Janet would say. Parts of it remain in different places, and the whole of it nowhere. One’s native land seems foreign. It is not wholly a good thing, and I think I suffer from it.

His brother Henry had by this time made a different choice and had settled for the rest of his life in England. But William remained, with whatever reservations, rooted in America. He was, indeed, to stand out in the course of time as a ’typical’ American.

To you [he writes to his brother], who now have real practical relations and a place in the old world, I should think there was no necessity of ever coming back again. But Europe has been made what it is by men staying in their homes and fighting stubbornly generation after generation for all the beauty, comfort and order that they have got — we must abide and do the same.

To Pauline he repeatedly expresses a similar sentiment, as in the course of the following letter early in their acquaintance. The opening sentence refers to an invitation for her to come for a visit to Cambridge: —

C/o EDMUND TWEEDY, ESQ.
Newport, R. I.
April 18, ‘99.
Alas, my dear Pauline, what a letter from you is this that Mrs. James sends me from home this morning? I did make bold to hope that you might come. Is there no one to take your place on the Consumers’ League? Or can’t you come — after the first of May? Mrs. Brandeis — that charming being — whom I recently saw at Mrs. Evans’, told me of your summer plan, but said you were to leave early in May. Is the date such as to make a visit quite impossible? I should so ‘admire ’ to see you playing the part of a member of our family.
What a winter of estrangement it has been! With no lectures given or heard, no pups offered and ignored or contemptuously rejected by telegraph, no snatches at conversation in the midst of crowds, no bashings on the lawn at Bryn Mawr, no nothing at all, in short; and yet all sorts of real things to talk about, accumulating on my side of the fence. You may say ‘why, since you have a week of holiday, don’t you run down here, and come and see me and talk them over? Well! that sounnds natural; but . . . there are a number of reasons too long and subtle to be put down on paper why I must stay here at Newport and not go to New York during this April recess. So if you can’t come to us in May, I must even waft you with this a quasi-eternal farewell. I am glad on the whole to hear of your determination to go abroad only for the summer and to spend most, if not all, of your time in the British Isles. . . . The ideal use to be made of Europe, in my opinion (at any rate when one is of my age), is to go there in the spring, and spend 3 months of irresponsible travel, and then come home. Not settle down anywhere for the winter. You get an extraordinary refreshment from the sight of the beauty and the novelty; and when that mood wears off, you had better get back to your own work again. It would be nice, all the same, to meet you in Europe next winter — no matter where. . . .
Now this is a long letter and a good one, and says nothing about pups, so I am disposed to demand an immediate reply. Pray write to me here and tell me whether you can possibly come after the 1st of May. . . .
And in any and every case, believe me — with friendliest regards to your mother and sisters,
Your sincere friend
WM. JAMES

III

A decade later the note of sadness, the Zwiespalt between ‘incompatible allegiances,’ is uppermost in a letter written from New Hampshire during the Indian summer season.

AT SALTER’S ‘HILL TOP’Thursday, Oct. 22nd, ’08.
DEAR PAULINE, You see where I am. We reached Boston last Friday after a stormy passage, and I took the train on Saturday morning straight up here. I go down this afternoon to attend poor Charles Norton’s funeral. He was 82, and has had on the whole a fortunate life, having cooperated with most of the better things that were going in his time, and having given great help and encouragement to individuals by his appreciative sympathy and recommendations, when as yet they were unknown. Verily a good way in which to be remembered.
How I wish I had had you near me these last days to compare the way in which the exchange of continents had affected us severally. I think that to some extent, at any rate, our impressions would have been the same. One gets so quickly attuned to the beauty, solidity and tidyness of Europe that it makes one’s own country seem strange, and in my case the effect is enhanced by the fact that I can bear no practical part in improving the face of nature now-a-days, and the excellent way in which Europe takes care of you instead of appealing to you to take care of her exactly suits my complaint. Here, everything is to be done. . . . When I came up here it was heart-breaking. Two souls in my breast. The ancient American beauty of the season, unutterably sentimental in its femininity and dearth, and the robust fullness of all that I had left in England. The two schemes of being are so discrepant that one should draw no comparisons. But the total result, anchored as I am to America, is to fill me with pathos and pangs.... I know that you too feel the double pull also, and I would give anything to have you near, so as to compare notes. How jolly, but how short that meeting was in London. . . .
Goodbye!
Your always affectionate
W. J.

This was, however, a passing mood. The autumn splendor, as a rule, awoke in him a spiritual no less than a physical response, and fortified his essential Americanism. On another occasion he writes from New Hampshire: —

About to leave these sylvan glories, what is more natural than to write a word to you, and express my sorrow that you had to return to town before they had developed? I have been fortunate enough to wait till yellow is beginning to be the prevailing colour, but the whole preceding month has been a spectacle of jewelry, as if the world were rubies and gold, and emerald and topaz. The thing has been at once violently sensational and exquisitely spiritual. I never saw so much of it, or such warm Americanism in the atmosphere, and I wish that you could have enjoyed it with me. It makes one patriotic!
I have been thinking of Keene Valley and East Hill the past few days, for I have been writing, at Professor Knight’s solicitation (a Saint Andrews professor — editor of Wordsworth), 37 pp. of reminiscence of T. Davidson, to go into a ‘life’ of him which K. is about to publish. When once I got started, I enjoyed the writing greatly — with D. as a subject, it became so easy to be racy. . . .
I am in fine condition, almost my own self again in spirit as indeed I ought to be, for my outward duties etc. are now ‘fixed’ so harmoniously. Goodbye! Have a good winter, don’t over work yourself, and keep a place in your affections for your ancient but faithful friend.
W. J.

Over against this flaming picture — the ‘hillsides recking, as it were, and aflame with ruby and gold and emerald and topaz,’ as lie puts it in the article on Thomas Davidson — may be set an ordinary American winter landscape, as seen from a railroad window and sketched in black and white in the course of a letter from the train: —

BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO SPECIAL
Feb. 24 [1904], 9 A.M. at Syracuse,
just after breakfast,
MY DEAR PAULINE, This is just a part of my yesterday’s letter. I forgot to say certain things then. For instance to express a hope that the Bryn Mawr dinner went off well — if it has gone off. What male Being or Beings did you have there? Do you make speeches (here goes the train!). And did you or Mile. Josephine make one? . . .
We are rocking and stumbling along through a wild northeasterly storm. The snow is over, but the horizons disappear in the blackish grey of a frozen atmospheric jelly, while the white fields receive the trees against them as if drawn in pencil, the house roofs and the car roofs when we pass them are pure white and break beautifully upon their almost black sides, altogether it is a beautiful drawing in crayon and stump; ami good as summer is for the soul, I verily suspect that winter is more beautiful for the eye — on the whole, and I would n’t spend a winter entirely without our wild cold and snow for anything. I saw some exquisite days, the perfection of weather, in Florida, but when I came back to Boston cold, I said, ‘This is my native air and I claim it.’ It is only a question of the number of weeks one shall claim it.
I go back, now, I hope, to a less interrupted half year, in which I may possibly do some of my own proper tasks; so far, it has been nothing but jobs to oblige others, to which I could n’t say no. I am ashamed to say how much interested I have become in my own system of philosophy (!) since Dewey, Schiller, a Frenchman named Bergson, and some lesser lights, have, all independently of me and of one another, struck into a similar line of ideas. I am persuaded that a great new philosophic movement is in the air, and I pray to be spared to play an active part in it. Those movements seem ridiculously abstract in their original form, but they filter down into practical life through the remotest channels. Now! there! Is n’t that the best letter I ever wrote you? I pray you, make response! How has the work at the League gone? How has society gone? How has reading gone? Of course you are pro-Jap. Are n’t they little Romans? This seems to me a case where one’s anti-war principles have to yield before the presence of deep animal instincts. For the issue is unquestionably, ‘Shall all races succumb to the white race?’ And I don’t believe that God meant that they should lie down just yet. However it turns out, it will make the world a worse place to live in for a long time to come. If the Japs beat, it may be one of the great turning points in human history. Certainly they feel that and will fight to exhaustion. And so, for that matter, ought Russia to. GocJbye, and God bless you, whoever may beat. Your W. J.

A different American scene, on the grandest scale, is reflected in a letter from the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Here Mr. James had stopped on his way across the continent to lecture at Stanford University, California, during the second term of 1906: —

DEAR PAOLINA,
I am breaking my journey by a day here, and it seems a good place from which to date my New Year’s greeting to you. But we correspond so rarely that when it comes to the point of tracing actual words with the pen, the last impressions of the day and the more permanent interests of one’s life block the way for each other. I think, however, that a word about the Canyon may fitly take precedence. It certainly is equal to the brag; and, like so many of the more stupendous freaks of nature, seems at first smaller and more manageable than one had supposed. But it grows in immensity as the eye penetrates it more intimately. It is so entirely alone in character that one has no habits of association with ‘the likes’ of it, and at first it seems a foreign curiosity; but already in this one day I am feeling myself grow nearer, and I can well imagine that, with greater intimacy, it might become the passion of one’s life — so far as ‘Nature’ goes. The conditions have been unfavorable for intimate communion. Three degrees above zero, and a spring overcoat, prevent that forgetting of ‘self’ which is said to be indispensable to absorption in Beauty. Moreover, I have kept upon the ‘ rim,’ seeing the Canyon from several points some miles apart. I meant to go down, having but this day; but they could n’t send me or anyone today; and I confess that, with my precipice-disliking soul, I was relieved, though it very likely would have proved less uncomfortable than I have been told. (I resolved to go, in order to be worthy of being your correspondent.) As Chas. Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by ‘circumstances beyond your control’ from even trying to execute them. But if ever I get here in summer, I shall go straight down and live there. I am sure that it is indispensable. But it is vain to waste descriptive words on the wondrous apparition, with its symphonies of architecture and of colour. I have just been watching its peaks blush in the setting sun, and slowly lose their fire. Night nestling in the depths. Solemn, solemn! And a unity of design that makes it seem like an individual, an animate being. Good night, old chasm! . . .
And now, dear Paolina, what of yourself? I try to think of your life and occupations, but can’t do so successfully. Enlighten me. Write a good, long, gossipy, egotistic, tattling letter, telling me about everything, important and unimportant. Such a letter as I inwardly deserve, though I do so little outwardly to merit it. Address ‘Stanford University, California.’ . . , I have just taken the liberty of sending a copy of Kipps (first-rate!) to your sister Josephine — I hope that you have n’t all read it already. Write! write! write! and lengthily! to Yours as ever
W. J.

IV

Two late letters, written in 1909, the year before Mr. James’s death, touch on a Western camping trip of Pauline’s, with all the old ardor of enjoyment: —

SILVER LAKE, N. H.
June 22d, ’09
DEAR PAULINE,
Instead of having to stay on at Cambridge as two and a half weeks ago I thought I should, I found that I could get away, so I came up here immediately to the Salters’, where I have been living in a state of high contentment and communion with nature ever since. Previous to that I was at Stockbridge and Salisbury, and am only confirmed in my old belief that with May and June doing what they are doing, in the country, it is sin and suicide for any free man or woman deliberately to stay in town. The simplification of life, the good smelling air, the exquisiteness of the leafage, the wild flowers and birds, the coolness (until yesterday), have all been balm to my soul, and I find that by walking slowly enough I can get about anywhere and everywhere I will. I have thought of you shut up in New York, with aching protest. My own family, too, in Cambridge, seem to me perverse. . . . I have just finally declined an invitation to the Jubilee of the University of Geneva, where I understood confidentially that I was to be made a Doctor of Theology!!!! The temptation was strong to go, so as to crow over Royce, and listen to his sarcasms in return — Irving Street would be more lively as a result! Besides, there was a possible breath of Switzerland again. But that is all dismissed, and I look forward to July and most of August at our place here (the family arriving about July 1st), with (hoffentlich) 3 or 4 weeks at ‘the Valley’ after that! Meanwhile I make myself happy reading Plutarch’s Lives, which (strange to say) I open for the first time in my G8th year. The time for standard works is assuredly old age, so I don’t ’urge you to go at Plutarch now, tho I’m sure you will enjoy him if you do. He’s as enthralling as any modern novelist, as good a story teller, moralist, and psychologist, and more everlasting human business gets transacted in his pages than in any others I know — they are, as Emerson said, ‘rammed with life.’ Ah, Pauline, when shall you and I ever converse together again? I thought of you yesterday again in reading in a really charming volume called In Tuscany by one Carmichael. Have you seen it? If not, I must send you a copy. And don’t forget to tell me whether you have the Way of All Flesh and Tono Bungay. You must go to the Columbia River, or wherever that western camping project was to take you. Lose no chance during all these young years to live with nature — it is the eternal normal animal thing in us, overlaid by other more important human destinies, no doubt, but holding the fort in the middle as the security of all the rest. Go! and drink your fill! and temporarily forget everything except the day that is. You will tell me all about it, when you get back to the Valley in September.
I shall go down to Cambridge again on Friday and stay till after Commencement, bringing the family up to Chocorua. I trust that you and yours are all very well and either gone already or on the point of going to the blessed spot. Believe me, dear Pauline,
Yours ever affectionately,
WM. JAMES

CAMMUDGE, Sept. 5, 1909.
DEAR PAULINE:
Your letter of July 2oth reached me duly and gladdened my heart by awakening

lively images of the bath in Nature’s beauties and wonders which you were about to have. I hope you have drunk deep, for that goes to a certain spot in us that nothing else can reach, more ‘serious ’ and ‘ valuable’ tho’ other things profess (and indeed seem) to be. Where ‘Field and ‘Yoho Valley’ are I have n’t the least idea, but somewhere, I suppose, off the Canadian Pacific Road, which I only hope you will have enjoyed as I enjoyed it 10 years ago. The big continental consciousness that one gets in traversing America is an element of experience wholly unlike anything else, when one gets it for the first time — I fear, however, that the 1st time usually means the last time so far as the wondrous soul-dilating part of it goes. If you had sent me any possible address, I should have written to you — but you did n’t. . . .
Write to me how it went with you this summer, dear Pauline — no very long letter if you don’t feel like one, but enough to reassure your ever affectionate old friend.
W. J.

The last letter, like the first and almost every one of this correspondence, returns to the out-of-doors. It was again from Nauheim, from the beautiful park which he loved there; it was near the end. But it speaks of trees, and blackbirds, and the open air.

NAUHEIM, May 29th, 1910
BELOVED PAULINE,
On this rainy lonely morning, my heart goes out in your direction and I can’t help sending you a Grass. I went to my bath at six this a.m. (it is now 10.30) and had the park, the trees and the blackbirds all to myself. Would thou had’st been there! This was because I am expecting a certain powerful young professor named Goldstein from Darmstadt, who is translating one of my books, and I had to get the bath out of the way. It has begun to rain, and I hope that G. won’t come; for to converse in this place and not to be in the open air is altogether wrong.
Well! God bless you, Pauline. Be good and happy.
Your old friend
W. J.