If I had gone with you, you would not have been happy, nor enjoyed yourself.

Nor would I.You must try to realise what two years cellular confinement is, and what two years of absolute silence means to a man of my intellectual power.

To have survived at all--to have come out sane in mind and sound of body--is a thing so marvellous to me, that it seems to me sometimes, not that the age of miracles is over, but that it is just beginning; that there are powers in God, and powers in man, of which the world has up to the present known little.

But while I am cheerful, happy, and have sustained to the full that passionate interest in life and art that was the dominant chord of my nature, and made all modes of existence and all forms of expression utterly fascinating to me always--still I need rest, quiet, and often complete solitude.

Friends have come to see me here for a day, and have been delighted to find me like my old self, in all intellectual energy and sensitiveness to the play of life, but it has always proved afterwards to have been a strain upon a nervous force, much of which has been destroyed.