"16, Abingdon Street, Westminster, Jan. 28, 1804.
My dear friend,
It is idle for me to say to you, that my heart and very soul ache with
the dull pain of one struck down and stunned. I write to you, for my
letter cannot give you unmixed pain, and I would fain say a few words to
dissuade you. What good can possibly come of your plan? Will not the very
chairs and furniture of your room be shortly more, far more intolerable
to you than new and changing objects! more insufferable reflectors of
pain and weariness of spirit? Oh, most certainly they will! You must
hope, my dearest Wedgewood; you must act as if you hoped. Despair itself
has but that advice to give you. Have you ever thought of trying large
doses of opium, a hot climate, keeping your body open by grapes, and the
fruits of the climate?[110]
Is it possible that by drinking freely, you might at last produce the
gout, and that a violent pain and inflammation in the extremities might
produce new trains of motion and feeling in your stomach, and the organs
connected with the stomach, known and unknown? Worse than what you have
decreed for yourself cannot well happen. Say but a word and I will come
to you, will be with you, will go with you to Malta, to Madeira, to
Jamaica, or (if the climate, of which, and its strange effects, I have
heard wonders, true or not) to Egypt.
At all events, and at the worst even, if you do attempt to realize the
scheme of going to and remaining at Gunville, for God's sake, my dear
dear friend, do keep up a correspondence with one or more; or if it were
possible for you, with several. I know by a little what your sufferings
are, and that to shut the eyes, and stop up the ears, is to give one's
self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid forms and horrors of a
dream. I scarce know why it is; a feeling I have, and which I can hardly
understand. I could not endure to live if I had not a firm faith that
the life within you will pass forth out of the furnace, for that
you have borne what you have borne, and so acted beneath such
pressure--constitutes you an awful moral being. I am not ashamed to pray
aloud for you.
Your most affectionate friend,