In the summer of 1915, Henry James wrote commemorative essays about two august American periodicals, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation. Recalling his youthful years in Boston and Cambridge, James fondly remembers ‘the American, or at least the Northern, state of mind and of life that began to develop just after the Civil War’. Pointing to ‘the deep illusions and fallacies in which the great glare of the present seems to show us as then steeped’, he relishes the memory of a ‘complacency’ that believes war and violence over for good. James describes a deluded ‘golden age’ peopled by, among others, Charles Eliot Norton, professor of art history at Harvard, editor and friend to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, and preeminent scholar and translator of Dante. Looking back from the terrible wartime present, James reminds himself that ‘the whole scene and the whole time . . . were, they flourished, they temporarily triumphed, that scene, that time, those conditions; they are not a dream that we drug ourselves to enjoy, but a chapter, and the most copious, of experience’.James may be responding here to his friend Henry Adams. Upon reading James’s 1914 memoir, Adams had suggested that it did in fact portray a dream: he wrote to another friend, ‘Poor Henry James thinks it all real, I believe, and actually still lives in that dreamy, stuffy Newport and Cambridge, with papa James and Charles Norton – and me!’Adams had already pointed to Boston’s complacency in his Education, and he and James had already discussed whether or not the atmosphere of their mutual Bostonian and expatriate history was ‘golden’: in 1903, as in 1914, Adams had seen emptiness where James sought to portray a ‘golden glow’.The ‘golden age’ that James evokes in 1915 is golden partly because of its brightly optimistic deludedness.