But most powerful of all influences that made the Jameses rebel against the narrowness of Broadway and the provincial spareness of the old New York, which must have been something like a neat virgin Bloomsbury, was their father. The Reverend Henry James was wasted on young America; it had developed neither the creative stream that would have inspired him nor the intellectual follies that he could slay with that beautiful wit which made him one of the great letter-writers of the world. "Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease, only infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence which guides human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians." The man who could write that should have been a strong and salutary influence on English culture, and he knew it. It is probable that when he and his wife paid what Mr James tells us was their "first (that is our mother's first) visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have lasted some year and a half"--the last clause of this sentence is unfortunate for a novelist famous for his deliberation--he brought his babies with him with a solemnity of intention, as if to dip them in a holy well. Thus it was that the little Jameses not only bore themselves proudly through their childhood as became those who had lived as babies in Piccadilly, and read _Punch_ with a proprietary instinct, but were also possessed in spirit by something that was more than the discontent with the flatness of daily life and the desire for a brighter scene that comes to the ordinary child. From their father's preoccupation they gained a rationalised consciousness that America was an incomplete environment, that in Europe there were many mines of treasure which they must find and rifle if they hoped for the health of their minds and the salvation of their souls.