Yet, after all, I will not have you come!  The farewells are bad enough which come to us, without our going to seek them, and I would rather wait and meet you on the Continent, or in England again, than see you now, just to part from you.  And you cannot guess how shaken I am, and how I cling to every plank of a little calm.  Perhaps I am going on the 17th or 20th.  Certainly I have made up my mind to do it, and shall do it as a bare matter of duty; and it is one of the most painful acts of duty which my whole life has set before me.  The road is as rough as possible, as far as I can see it.  At the same time, being absolutely convinced from my own experience and perceptions, and the unhesitating advice of two able medical men (Dr. Chambers, one of them), that to escape the English winter will be everything for me, and that it involves the comfort and usefulness of the rest of my life, I have resolved to do it, let the circumstances of the doing be as painful as they may.  If you were to see me you would be astonished to see the work of the past summer; but all these improvements will ebb away with the sun—­while I am assured of permanent good if I leave England.  The struggle with me has been a very painful one; I cannot enter on the how and wherefore at this moment.  I had expected more help than I have found, and am left to myself, and thrown so on my own sense of duty as to feel it right, for the sake of future years, to make an effort to stand by myself as I best can.  At the same time, I will not tell you that at the last hour something may not happen to keep me at home. That is neither impossible nor improbable.  If, for instance, I find that I cannot have one of my brothers with me, why, the going in that case would be out of the question.  Under ordinary circumstances I shall go, and if the experiment of going fails, why, then I shall have had the satisfaction of having tried it, and of knowing that it is God’s will which keeps me a prisoner, and makes me a burden.  As it is, I have been told that if I had gone years ago I should be well now; that one lung is very slightly affected, but the nervous system absolutely shattered, as the state of the pulse proves.  I am in the habit of taking forty drops of laudanum a day, and cannot do with less, that is, the medical man told me that I could not do with less, saying so with his hand on the pulse.  The cold weather, they say, acts on the lungs, and produces the weakness indirectly, whereas the necessary shutting up acts on the nerves and prevents them from having a chance of recovering their tone.  And thus, without any mortal disease, or any disease of equivalent seriousness, I am thrown out of life, out of the ordinary sphere of its enjoyment and activity, and made a burden to myself and to others.  Whereas there is a means of escape from these evils, and God has opened the door of escape, as wide as I see it!

In all ways, for my own happiness’s sake I do need a proof that the evil is irremediable.  And this proof (or the counter-proof) I am about to seek in Italy.