A poetical counterpart to this letter will be found in the piece
beginning 'Not yet, my soul, these friendly fields desert,' which was
composed at the same time and is printed in _Underwoods_.
_San Francisco, April 16 [1880]._
MY DEAR GOSSE,--You have not answered my last; and I know you will
repent when you hear how near I have been to another world. For about
six weeks I have been in utter doubt; it was a toss-up for life or death
all that time; but I won the toss, sir, and Hades went off once more
discomfited. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that I
have a friendly game with that gentleman. I know he will end by cleaning
me out; but the rogue is insidious, and the habit of that sort of
gambling seems to be a part of my nature; it was, I suspect, too much
indulged in youth; break your children of this tendency, my dear Gosse,
from the first. It is, when once formed, a habit more fatal than
opium--I speak, as St. Paul says, like a fool. I have been very very
sick; on the verge of a galloping consumption, cold sweats, prostrating
attacks of cough, sinking fits in which I lost the power of speech,
fever, and all the ugliest circumstances of the disease; and I have
cause to bless God, my wife that is to be, and one Dr. Bamford (a name
the Muse repels), that I have come out of all this, and got my feet once
more upon a little hilltop, with a fair prospect of life and some new
desire of living. Yet I did not wish to die, neither; only I felt unable
to go on farther with that rough horseplay of human life: a man must be
pretty well to take the business in good part. Yet I felt all the time
that I had done nothing to entitle me to an honourable discharge; that I
had taken up many obligations and begun many friendships which I had no
right to put away from me; and that for me to die was to play the cur
and slinking sybarite, and desert the colours on the eve of the decisive
fight. Of course I have done no work for I do not know how long; and
here you can triumph. I have been reduced to writing verses for
amusement. A fact. The whirligig of time brings in its revenges, after
all. But I'll have them buried with me, I think, for I have not the
heart to burn them while I live. Do write. I shall go to the mountains
as soon as the weather clears; on the way thither, I marry myself; then
I set up my family altar among the pine-woods, 3,000 feet, sir, from the
disputatious sea.--I am, dear Weg, most truly yours,