My health is better. I had got into a labyrinth of headaches and palpitations, but I think I am out of it now, and I hope to keep well. I am not the less obliged to you, dear Fanny, for wishing to have me with you. But to leave London now would not be agreeable to me, even if it were morally possible. To see you again would certainly be a pleasure, but I hope that will come to pass without my crossing the Irish Channel.
[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Saturday, 18th April, 1854.]
I am rather overdone with the week's work, and the prospect of what is to come next. Poor Lewes is ill, and is ordered not to put pen to paper for a month; so I have something to do for him in addition to my own work, which is rather pressing. He is gone to Arthur Helps, in Hampshire, for ten days, and I really hope this total cessation from work, in obedience to a peremptory order, will end in making him better than he has been for the last year. No opera and no fun for me for the next month. Happily, I shall have no time to regret it. Plenty of bright sun on your anemone bed. How lovely your place must look, with its fresh leaves!
[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 23d May, 1854.]
It is quite possible that I may wish to go to the Continent, or twenty other things. Mr. Lewes is going on a walking excursion to Windsor to-day with his doctor, who pronounces him better, but not yet fit for work. However, he is obliged to do a little, and must content himself with an _approximation_ to his doctor's directions. In this world all things are approximations, and in the system of the Dog Star too, in spite of Dr. Whewell.
[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Friday, no date, 1854.]
My troubles are purely psychical--self-dissatisfaction, and despair of achieving anything worth the doing. I can truly say they vanish into nothing before any fear for the happiness of those I love. Thank you for letting me know how things are, for indeed I could not bear to be shut out from your anxieties. When I spoke of myself as an island, I did not mean that I was so exceptionally. We are all islands--
"Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe, Our hermit spirits dwell and roam apart"--
and this seclusion is sometimes the most intensely felt at the very moment your friend is caressing you or consoling you. But this gradually becomes a source of satisfaction instead of repining. When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business--that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives, and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. But we begin at last to understand that these things are important only to our own consciousness, which is but as a globule of dew on a rose-leaf, that at mid-day there will be no trace of. This is no high-flown sentimentality, but a simple reflection, which I find useful to me every day. I expect to see Mr. Lewes back again to-day. His poor head--his only fortune--is not well yet; and he has had the misery of being _ennuyé_ with idleness, without perceiving the compensating physical improvement. Still, I hope the good he has been getting has been greater than he has been conscious of. I expect "Feuerbach" will be all in print by the end of next week, and there are no skippings, except such as have been made on very urgent grounds.