The 'irresistibly touching' Concord River

The iteration of the Old North Bridge over the Concord River in 1900, a bit before Henry James’s visit. The original bridge (see picture below) was the site of the Battle of Concord, on April 19, 1775, at the opening of the American Revolution. The bridge was frequently replaced in Colonial times because of flooding.

“I hung over Concord River then as long as I could, and recalled how Thoreau, Hawthome, Emerson himself, have expressed with due sympathy the sense of this full, slow, sleepy, meadowy flood, which sets its pace and takes its twists like some large obese benevolent person, scarce so frankly unsociable as to pass you at all. It had watched the Fight, it even now confesses, without a quickening of its current, and it draws along the woods and the orchards and the fields with the purr of a mild domesticated cat who rubs against the family and the furniture. Not to be recorded, at best, however, I think, never to emerge from the state of the inexpressible, in respect to the spot, by the bridge, where one most lingers, is the sharpest suggestion of the whole scene—the power diffused in it which makes it, after all these years, or perhaps indeed by reason of their number, so irresistibly touching.’’

— Henry James, in The American Scene (1907)

A 1775 drawing by Amos Doolittle of the engagement at the North Bridge based on witness accounts his own inspection of the bridge

The present bridge, built in 1956, is an approximate replica of the bridge, built in 1760, that stood in the battle.

Stretches of the Concord River are gorgeous.

Henry James and American painters

 "Santa Maria Della Salute, Venice,"   (1903-1907, watercolor on paper), by John Singer Sargent, in the show "Henry James and American Painting,'' at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, through Jan. 21.

The museum (sadly now most famous as the victim of the biggest art theft in history) comments:

"Henry James (1843-1916) was an American writer who is considered to be one of the greatest novelists in the English language. His literary work includes such well-known and beloved novels as Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors. What one may not know is that he held close relationships with several artists of his day, including the Italian-born painter John Singer Sargent (1856- 1925).''

James spent much of his later life living in England but before then lived in Boston and Newport, R.I., among other places. Sargent's father was from Gloucester, Mass.

'These April sunsets'

"I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea,
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all."

-  Henry James, in Portrait of a Lady