The school died in the last quarter of the century consumed of its own impetuous spirit, and it left no heirs. A feminine age had come, an age of convention and of retrospect. The romantic gave way to the inevitable classic; the hot passion of revolt to the cool fit of deliberate art. In America, the New England school that had ruled the mid years of the century became reminiscent, fastidious, self-contained, to awake in sudden realization that it no longer was a power, that its own second generation were women led by Aldrich, James, Howells, immigrants from New York and the West. The early leaders, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, all intensity and conviction, had been replaced by the school of deliberate workmen who had no message for their times, only technique and brilliancy. I This reaction from the New England school can be studied nowhere more convincingly than in the personalities and work of Henry James, father and son. The elder James, companion of Carlyle and Emerson and Alcott, disciple and interpreter of Swedenborg and Sandeman, was a typical product of the mid-century school--mystical, intense, concerned with the inner rather than the other aspects of man. "Henry James was true comfort," Emerson wrote in his diary in 1850; "wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like the sun." He pursued no profession, but like Alcott devoted his life to philosophy and to literature. He wrote for the few a small handful of books, mostly forgotten now, though he who would read them will find them clothed in a richness of style and a felicity of expression that reminds one of the prose of the greater periods of English literature.[92] The son of this mid-century genius, Henry James, Jr., cultured, cold, scientific, disciple of Turgenieff, of Flaubert and Daudet, Maupassant and Zola--"grandsons of Balzac"--stands as the type of the "later manner," the new school that wrote without message, that studied with intensity the older models, that talked evermore of its "art."