hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That
mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something
terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our
loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with
them.




IV.

It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which was the fourth or
fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I made the acquaintance of a man,
very much my senior, who remains one of the vividest personalities in my
recollection. I speak of him in this order perhaps because of an obscure
association with Boyesen through their religious faith, which was also
mine. But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either
of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and
intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men. He did not do this in
any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way,
with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual
realities from which they project. His piety, which sometimes expressed
itself in terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too large for
any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn from the books which record
it, how absolutely individual his interpretations of Swedenborg were.
Clarifications they cannot be called, and in that other world whose
substantial verity was the inspiration of his life here, the two sages
may by this time have met and agreed to differ as to some points in the
doctrine of the Seer. In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle
giving way; and I do not say he would be wrong to insist, but I think he