elf cannot answer." I meant by this to say that
one must not be called upon to explain what is evidently inexplicable.
Mr. James, however, did not so understand me, but told me afterwards
that he considered this the most extraordinary statement that he had
ever heard. He discoursed a good deal after my lecture with much color
and brilliancy, as was his wont. His views of the Divine were highly
anthropomorphic, and I remember that he said among other things, "My
dear Madam, God is working all the time in his shirt-sleeves with all
his might."

This dear man was a great addition to the thought-power current in
Boston society. He had lived much abroad, and was for many years a
student of Swedenborg and of Fourier. His cast of mind was more
metaphysical than logical, and he delighted in paradox. In his writings
he would sometimes overstate greatly, in order to be sure of impressing
his meaning upon his readers or hearers. Himself a devout Christian, he
nevertheless once said, speaking on Sunday in the Church of the
Disciples, that the moral law and the Christian Church were the meanest
of inventions. He intended by this phrase to express his sense of the
exalted moral and religious obligation of the human mind, the dignity of
which ought to transcend the prescriptions of the Decalogue and the
discipline of the church. My eldest daughter, then a girl of sixteen,
said to me as we left the church, "Mamma, I should think that Mr. James
would wish the little Jameses not to wash their faces for fear it should
make them suppose that they were clean." Mr. Emerson, to whom I repeated
this remark, laughed quite heartily at it. In anecdote Mr. James was
inexhaustible. His temperament was very mercurial, almost explosive. I
remember a delightful lecture of his on Carlyle. I recall, too, a rather
metaphysical discourse which he read in John Dwight's parlors, to a
select audience. When we went below stairs to put on our wraps, I asked
a witty friend whether she had enjoyed the lecture. She replied that she
had, but added, "I would give anything at this moment for a look at a
good fat idiot," which seemed to show that the tension of mind produced
by the lecture had not been without pain.

I once had a long talk with Mr. James on immortality. I had recently
lost my youngest child, a beautiful little boy of three years. The
question of a future life then came to me with an agonized intensity.
Should I ever meet again the exquisite little c