As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.--You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself. Ever your W. J. When the College term ended in June, 1899, the sailing date of the European steamer on which James had taken passage for his wife and daughter and himself was still three weeks away. He turned again to the Adirondack Lodge and there persuaded himself, to his intense satisfaction, that if he walked slowly and alone, so that there was no temptation to talk while walking, or to keep on when he felt like stopping, he could still spend several hours a day on the mountain sides without inconvenience to his heart. But one afternoon he took a wrong path and did not discover his mistake until he had gone so far that it seemed safer to go on than to turn back. So he kept on. But the "trail" he was following was not the one he supposed it to be and led him farther and farther. He fainted twice; it grew dark; but having neither food, coat, nor matches, he stumbled along until at last he came out on the Keene Valley road and, at nearly eleven o'clock at night, reached a house where he could get food and a conveyance. He ought to have avoided all exertion for weeks thereafter, but he tried again to make light of what had occurred, and, on getting back to Cambridge, spent a very active few days over final arrangements for his year of absence. When his boat had sailed and the stimulus which his last duties supplied had been withdrawn, he began to discover what condition he was in. XIII 1899-1902 _Two years of Illness in Europe--Retirement from Active Duty at Harvard--The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures_