...I had great movings of my bowels toward thee lately--the distant, cynical isolation in which we live with our heart's best brothers sometimes comes over me with a deep bitterness, and I had a little while ago an experience of life which woke up the spiritual monad within me as has not happened more than once or twice before in my life. "Malgré la vue des misères où nous vivons et qui nous tiennent par la gorge," there is an inextinguishable spark which will, when we least expect it, flash out and reveal the existence, at least, of something real--of reason at the bottom of things. I can't tell you how it was now. I'm swamped in an empirical philosophy.[53] I feel that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws; and yet, notwithstanding, we are _en rapport_ with reason.--How to conceive it? Who knows? I'm convinced that the defensive tactics of the French "spiritualists" fighting a steady retreat before materialism will never do anything.--It is not that we are all nature _but_ some point which is reason, but that all is nature _and_ all is reason too. We shall see, damn it, we shall see!... [W. J.] * * * * * "The Bootts," with whom "architect Ware" reported the Reverend Mr. Foote to be hand in glove in Italy in 1867, reappear in the following letter. Francis Boott (Harvard 1832) had early been left a widower, and had just returned from a long European residence which he had devoted to the education of his charming and gifted daughter "Lizzie," later to become the wife of Frank Duveneck of Cincinnati, the painter and sculptor. Boott was about the age of Henry James, Senior, but the intimacy which began at Pomfret during the summer of 1869 ripened into one of those whole-family friendships which obliterate differences of age. Later, although both the elder Jameses and young Mrs. Duveneck had died, William and Boott saw each other frequently in Cambridge. The beautiful little commemorative address which James delivered after Boott's death has been included in the volume of "Memories and Studies." _To Henry P. Bowditch._ POMFRET, CONN., _Aug. 12, 1869_.