Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things.”
Hugh Kenner's magnum opus, The Pound Era, begins with this rosewater tableau. A sentence “to be rolled about on the tongue,” Kenner wrote gleefully in a letter to his literary compatriot, Guy Davenport, after having taken a month to write that one opening line (“breaking Joyce's snail-pace record of fifteen words in a day”).
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