ous
news first came to us via Auckland, etc., and then how, in the
newspapers, a doubt was raised about its authenticity--just enough to
give one a flicker of hope; until your telegram to me via San
Francisco--repeated also from other sources--converted my pessimistic
convictions into the wretched knowledge. All this time my thoughts
have hovered round you all, around _you_ in particular, with a
tenderness of which I could have wished you might have, afar-off, the
divination. You are such a visible picture of desolation that I need
to remind myself that courage, and patience, and fortitude are also
abundantly with you. The devotion that Louis inspired--and of which
all the air about you must be full--must also be much to you. Yet as I
write the word, indeed, I am almost ashamed of it--as if anything
could be 'much' in the presence of such an abysmal void. To have lived
in the light of that splendid life, that beautiful, bountiful
being--only to see it, from one moment to the other, converted into a
fable as strange and romantic as one of his own, a thing that has been
and has ended, is an anguish into which no one can enter with you
fully and of which no one can drain the cup for you. You are nearest
to the pain, because you were nearest the joy and the pride. But if it
is anything to you to know that no woman was ever more felt _with_ and
that your personal grief is the intensely personal grief of
innumerable hearts--know it well, my dear Fanny Stevenson, for during
all these days there has been friendship for you in the very air. For
myself, how shall I tell you how much poorer and shabbier the whole
world seems, and how one of the closest and strongest reasons for
going on, for trying and doing, for planning and dreaming of the
future, has dropped in an instant out of life. I was haunted indeed
with a sense that I should never again see him--but it was one of the
best things in life that he was _there_, or that one had him--at any
rate one heard him, and felt him and awaited him and counted him into
everything one most loved and lived for. He lighted up one whole side
of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one's
imagination. We are smaller fry and meaner people without him. I feel
as if there were a certain indelicacy in saying it to you, save that I
know that there is nothing narrow or selfish in your sense of
loss--for himself, however, for his happy name and his great visible
good fortune, it strikes