derstand, that in telling you that
it was impossible for me to do so, I was thinking as much of _you_ as of
myself. To think of the feelings and happiness of others is not an
entirely new emotion in my nature. I would be unjust to myself and my
friends, if I said it was. But I think of those things far more than I
used to do. 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. I have now no
_storage_[58] of nervous force. When I expend what I have, in an
afternoon, nothing remains. I look to quiet, to a simple mode of
existence, to nature in all the infinite meanings of an infinite word,
to charge the cells for me. Every day, if I meet a friend, or write a
letter longer than a few lines, or even read a book that makes, as all
fine books do, a direct claim on me, a direct appeal, an intellectual
challenge of any kind, I am utterly exhausted in the evening, and often
sleep badly. And yet it is three whole weeks since I was released.

Had I gone with you on the driving tour, where we would have of
necessity been in immediate contact with each other from dawn to sunset,
I would have certainly broken off the tour the third day, probably
broken down the second. You would have then found yourself in a pitiable
position: your tour would have been arrested at its outset: your
companion would have been ill without doubt: perhaps might have needed
care and attendance, in some little remot