CHAPTER XII
WALT WHITMAN
The Pagan Review
The brilliant summer was followed by a damp and foggy autumn. My husband’s depression increased with the varying of the year. While I was on a visit to my mother he wrote to me, after seeing me in the morning:
Grosvenor Club, Nov. 9th, 1891.
“ ... I have been here all day and have enjoyed the bodily rest, the inner quietude, and, latterly, a certain mental uplifting. But at first I was deep down in the blues. Anything like the appalling gloom between two and three-thirty! I could scarcely read, or do anything but watch it with a kind of fascinated horror. It is going down to the grave indeed to be submerged in that hideous pall.... As soon as I can make enough by fiction or the drama to depend thereon we’ll leave this atmosphere of fog and this environment of deadening, crushing, paralysing, death-in-life respectability. Circumstances make London thus for us: for me at least—for of course we carry our true atmosphere in ourselves—and places and towns are, in a general sense, mere accidents....
I have read to-day Edmond Schérer’s Essais on Eng. Literature: very able though not brilliant—reread the best portions of Jules Breton’s delightful autobiography, which I liked so much last year ... all George Moore’s New Novel, Vain Fortune.
I had also a pleasant hour or so dipping into Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other old dramatists: refreshed my forgotten acquaintanceship with that silly drama “Firmilian”: and, generally, enjoyed an irresponsible ramble thro’ whatever came to hand. I am now all right again and send you this little breath, this little ‘Sospiro di Guglielmo,’ to give you, if perchance you need it, a tonic stimulus. No, you don’t need it!”