...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or "work upon" you--under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to speak, and laid low--simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing so a little through this pale and limping substitute--and such are some of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made _had_ I been--or were I just now--face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some occasion more _like_ that larger and braver contact than these ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here--where, frankly, the sense of aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle of such days as these particular ones happen to be--a glory of golden sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my jaundiced eye if anything _could_. But better fifty years of fogland--where indeed I have, alas, almost _had_ my fifty years! However, count on me to at least _try_ to put in a few more.
...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is _have_ heard from W. E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key indeed--in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But I don't dream of your "answering" this--it pretends to all the purity of absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here (as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome--though indeed only to mock at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old friend,