From Louis Leverett in Boston to Harvard Tremont in Paris

November 1880.

The scales have turned, my sympathetic Harvard, and the beam that has lifted you up has dropped me again on this terribly hard spot. I’m extremely sorry to have missed you in London, but I received your little note and took due heed¹ of your injunction to let you know how I got on. I don’t get on at all, my dear Harvard — I’m consumed with the love of the further shore. I’ve been so long away that I’ve dropped out of my place in this little Boston world and the shallow tides of New England life have closed over it. I’m a stranger here and find it hard to believe I ever was a native. It’s very hard, very cold, very vacant. I think of your warm rich Paris; I think of the Boulevard Saint–Michel on the mild spring evenings; I see the little corner by the window (of the Café de la Jeunesse) where I used to sit: the doors are open, the soft deep breath of the great city comes in. The sense is of a supreme² splendour and an incomparable arrangement, yet there’s a kind of tone, of body, in the radiance; the mighty³ murmur⁴ of the ripest civilisation⁵ in the world comes in; the dear old peuple de Paris, the most interesting people in the world, pass by. I’ve a little book in my pocket; it’s exquisitely⁶ printed, a modern Elzevir. It consists of a lyric⁷ cry from the heart of young France and is full of the sentiment of form. There’s no form here, dear Harvard; I had no idea how little form there is. I don’t know what I shall do; I feel so undraped, so uncurtained, so uncushioned; I feel as if I were sitting in the centre of a mighty “reflector.” A terrible crude glare is over everything; the earth looks peeled and excoriated⁸; the raw heavens seem to bleed with the quick hard light.

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