_To Robert Louis Stevenson._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
April 15th, 1892.
My dear Louis,
I send you by this post the magnificent Memoires de Marbot, which should
have gone to you sooner by my hand if I had sooner read them and sooner,
thereby, grasped the idea of how much they would probably beguile for
you the shimmering tropical noon. The three volumes go to you in three
separate registered book-post parcels and all my prayers for an escape
from the queer perils of the way attend and hover about them. Some
people, I believe, consider this fascinating warrior a bien-conditionne
Munchausen--but perish the injurious thought. Me he not only charms but
convinces. I can't manage a letter, my dear Louis, to-day--I wrote you a
longish one, via San Francisco (like this,) just about a month ago. But
I mustn't fail to tell you that I have just read the last page of the
sweet collection of some of your happiest lucubrations put forth by the
care of dear Colvin. They make a most desirable, and moreover a very
honourable, volume. It was indispensable to bring them together and they
altogether justify it. The first one, and the Lantern-Bearers and two
last, are of course the best--these last are all made up of high and
admirable pages and do you the greatest credit. You have never felt,
thought, said, more finely and happily than in many a passage here, and
are in them altogether at your best. I don't see reviews or meet
newspapers now (beside which the work is scarcely in the market,) so I
don't know what fortune the book encounters--but it is enough for me--I
admit it can hardly be enough for you--that I love it. I pant for the
completion of The Wrecker--of which Colvin unwove the other night, to my
rapturous ear, the weird and wondrous tangle. I hope I don't give him
away if I tell you he even read me a very interesting letter from
you--though studded with critical stardust in which I a little lost my
way--telling of a project of a dashing roman de moeurs all about a
wicked woman. For this you may imagine how I yearn--though not to the
point of wanting it before the sequel of _Kidnapped_. For God's sake let
me have them both. I marvel at the liberality of your production and
rejoice in this high meridian of your genius. I leave London presently
for 3 or 4 months--I wish it were with everything required for leaping
on your strand. Sometimes I think I have got through the worst of
missing you and then I find I haven't. I pine for you as I pen these
words, for I am more and more companionless in my old age--more and more
shut up to the solitude inevitably the portion, in these islands, of him
who would really try, even in so small a way as mine, to _do_ it. I'm
often on the point of taking the train down to Skerryvore, to serenade
your ghosts, get them to throw a fellow a word. Consider this, at any
rate, a plaintive invocation. Again, again I greet your wife, that lady
of the closed lips, and I am yours, my dear Louis, and Lloyd's and your
mother's undiscourageably,