One of the most touching episodes in the Jameses’ lives is William James’s choice of an epitaph for his sister Alice’s grave and his brother Henry’s emotional response to seeing that grave, twelve years after Alice’s death. William picked two lines from Dante’s Paradiso for the inscription on Alice’s tomb:

1. . . . ed essa da martiro

2. e da essilio venne a questa pace.

Henry’s 29 May 1905 notebook account of visiting the grave describes the Cambridge Cemetery setting and the view from the family plot and concludes with the epitaph:

James then quotes the lines, inaccurately actually, and gives his reaction to the epitaph. The quotation, he says, ‘took me so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, a deep ache’ (CN, 240).

Along with Lambert Strether’s ‘live all you can’ speech in The Ambassadors and Ralph Touchett’s death in The Portrait of a Lady, this notebook entry on Alice’s epitaph and grave is among the most moving passages Henry James ever wrote. William’s choice of so ‘inspired’ (to use Henry’s word) a quotation for Alice’s epitaph shows that his brilliance could manifest itself in the most poignant of ways and most personal of circumstances. Henry’s moving description of the grave expresses his sensitivity both to his sister’s suffering and to his older brother’s own sensitivity to that suffering. In other words, Alice’s grave helps us to glimpse some of the Jameses’ private, personal qualities and key aspects of their familial relations: sensitivity toward, understanding of, and deeply felt affection for others, and loyalty, devotion and mutual support among family members. A biographer wanting to emphasize the deep bonds of affection and understanding between the Jameses might choose to dwell on Alice’s epitaph; one more interested in the deleterious effects of William’s powerful personality upon Alice’s emotional well-being or in constructing a narrative of prolonged unconscious rivalry between William and Henry might underplay it.