/# The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in 1912. #/
/* Salisbury, Connecticut. May 29th, 1911. */
I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the 28th of that month--the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.
Behold me thus committed to Harvard--and unable moreover at this season of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from the University arrived with your kind letter--proposing to me the Degree of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.
I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate--or more possible--sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm, heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily beautiful and graceful and idyllic--for America....
I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,
/# Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May. #/