In 1840 he married Mary Walsh, the sister of a fellow student at Princeton, who had shared his religious doubts and had, with him, turned his back on the ministry and left the Seminary. She was the daughter of James and Mary (Robertson) Walsh of New York City, and was thus descended from Hugh Walsh, an Irishman of English extraction who came from Killingsley,[6] County Down, in 1764, and settled himself finally near Newburgh, and from Alexander Robertson, a Scotchman who came to America not long before the Revolution and whose name is borne by the school of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mary Walsh was a gentle lady, who accommodated her life to all her husband's vagaries and presided with cheerful indulgence over the development of her five children's divergent and uncompromising personalities. She lived entirely for her husband and children, and they, joking her and teasing her and adoring her, were devoted to her in return. Several contemporaries left accounts of their impressions of her husband without saying much about her; and this was natural, for she was not self-assertive and was inevitably eclipsed by his richly interesting presence. But it is all the more unfortunate that her son Henry, who might have done justice, as no one else could, to her good sense and to the grace of her mind and character, could not bring himself to include an adequate account of her in the "Small Boy and Others." To a reader who ventured to regret the omission, he replied sadly, "Oh! my dear Boy--that memory is too sacred!" William James spoke of her very seldom after her death, but then always with a sort of tender reverence that he vouchsafed to no one else. She supplied an element of serenity and discretion to the councils of the family of which they were often in need; and it would not be a mistake to look to her in trying to account for the unusual receptivity of mind and æsthetic sensibility that marked her two elder sons. During the three or four years that followed his marriage Henry James, Senior, appears to have spent his time in Albany and New York. In the latter city, in the old, or then new, Astor House, his eldest son was born on the eleventh of January, 1842. He named the boy William, and a few days later brought his friend R. W. Emerson to admire and give his blessing to the little philosopher-to-be.[7] Shortly afterwards the family moved into a house at No. 2 Washington Place, and there, on April 15, 1843, the second son, Henry, came into the world. There was thus a difference of fifteen months in the ages of William and the younger brother, who was also to become famous and who figures largely in the correspondence that follows.