Remains of Henry James; a reference which has the interest of being very
nearly as characteristic of my father himself (which his references in
almost any connection were wont to be) as of the person or the occasion
evoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my only
remembered grandparent she touches the chord of attachment to a
particular vibration. She represented for us in our generation the only
English blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins; I
confess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I feel
her image most beneficently bend. We were, as to three parts, of two
other stocks; and I recall how from far back I reflected--for I see I
must have been always reflecting--that, mixed as such a mixture, our
Scotch with our Irish, might be, it had had still a grace to borrow from
the third infusion or dimension. If I could freely have chosen moreover
it was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finest
faith in the vivifying and characterising force of mothers, I should
have wished to borrow it; even while conscious that Catherine Barber's
own people had drawn breath in American air for at least two generations
before her. Our father's father, William James, an Irishman and a
Protestant born (of county Cavan) had come to America, a very young man
and then sole of his family, shortly after the Revolutionary War; my
father, the second son of the third of the marriages to which the
country of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born in
Albany in 1811. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, Hugh
Walsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish home, Killyleagh, county
Down, somewhat earlier, in 1764, he being then nineteen; he had settled
at Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, half way to Albany, where some of his
descendants till lately lingered. Our maternal greatgrandfather on the
mother's side--that is our mother's mother's father, Alexander Robertson
of Polmont near Edinburgh--had likewise crossed the sea in the
mid-century and prospered in New York very much as Hugh Walsh was
prospering and William James was still more markedly to prosper, further
up the Hudson; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course of
which admirable stream I like to think of them. I find Alexander
Robertson inscribed in a wee New York directory of the close of the
century as Merchant; and our childhood in that city was passed, as to
some of its aspects,