"Coronado Beach, Cal., Wednesday, March 29, 1905.

The point for me (for fatal, for impossible expansion) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C[ambridge] that I sit and write of here by the strange Pacific on the other side of the continent, l'initiation première (the divine, the unique), there and in Ashburton Place. ... Ah, the 'epoch-making' weeks of the spring of 1865!--from the 1st days of April or so, to the summer ...! Something--some fine, superfine, supersubtle, mystic breath of that may come in perhaps in the Three Cities, in relation to any reference to the remembered Boston of the 'prime.' Ah, that pathetic, heroic little personal prime of my own, which stretched over into the following summer at Swampscott--'66--that of the Seven Weeks' War and of the unforgettable gropings and findings and sufferings and strivings and play of sensibility and of inward passion there. The hours, the moments, the days, come back to me--on into the early autumn before the move to Cambridge and with the sense, still, after such a lifetime of particular little thrills and throbs and daydreams there. I can't help, either, just touching with my pen-point (here, here, only here) the recollection of that (probably August) day when I went up to Boston from Swampscott and called in Charles St. for news of O.W.H., then on his 1st flushed and charming visit to England and saw his mother in the cool dim matted drawingroom of that house (past, never, since, without the sense), and got the news of all his London, his general English, success and felicity, and vibrated so with the wonder and romance and curiosity and dim weak tender (oh, tender!) envy of it, that my walk up the hill, up Mount Vernon St., and probably to Atheneum was all coloured and gilded, and humming with it, and the emotion, exquisite of its kind, so remained with me that I always think of that occasion, that hour, as a sovereign contribution to the germ of that inward romantic principle which was to determine so much later on (ten years!) my own vision-haunted migration."