'Sicilian, Theocritan, Poetic, Romantic, Academic'

Certain works are keyed to particular events throughout the year. In December I read the Christmas chapters in Pickwick Papers (much better than A Christmas Carol). At Passover, the Seder scene in Isaac Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home. At the vernal equinox, Hopkins’ "Spring." Autumn arrived on Monday and of course I read Keats. In recent years I’ve added Henry James’ The American Scene (1907) to the fall breviary; at least Chapter 1, “New England: An Autumn Impression.” Twenty years of living in upstate New York, near the Massachusetts and Vermont lines, spoiled me for the fall. I became an inveterate “leaf peeper,” and September and October were transformed into a discrete holiday. It’s not the same in Texas.  

James visited his brother William in Chocorua, N.H., late in the summer of 1905. This came during his year-long tour of his homeland after twenty years’ absence. The foliage was turning red and yellow. James writes:

   

“[T]he mild September glow and even the clear October blaze were things to play on the chords of memory and association, to say nothing of those of surprise, with an admirable art of their own. The tune may have dropped at last, but it succeeded for a month in being strangely sweet, and in producing, quite with intensity, the fine illusion.”

It’s those “chords of memory” I seek, from a distance of 1,500 miles. Was James thinking of Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” in his First Inaugural Address?  For James, the New England scene is Arcadian, “delicately Arcadian,” he writes:

“[H]illsides and rocky eminences and wild orchards, in short any common sequestered spot, could strike one as the more exquisitely and ideally Sicilian, Theocritan, poetic, romantic, academic, from their not bearing the burden of too much history. The history was there in its degree, and one came upon it, on sunny afternoons, in the form of the classic abandoned farm of the rude forefather who had lost patience with his fate.”

James turns everything he touches into story and into history.