March 10, 1897.
... Although I have had an unpleasant mental and physical set-back the last three days, I am steadily (at least I hope so) gaining ground—but I have never yet regained the health or spirits I was in at St. Remy, tho’ even there far more worn in mind and body than even you guessed. But with the spring I shall get well.
I am heart and soul with Greece in this war of race and freedom—and consider the so-called “Concert” a mockery and a sham. It is a huge Capitalist and Reactionary Bogus Company. Fortunately the tide of indignation is daily rising here—and even the Conservative papers are at one with the Liberal on the central points. Were I a younger man—or rather were I free—I would now be in Greece or on my way to join the Hellenes. As you will see by enclosed, I am one of the authors who have sent a special message to the Athenian President of the Chamber. It is a stirring time, and in many ways....
March 22d.
... What a whirl of excitement life is, just now. I am all on fire about the iniquities of this Turkish-Finance triumph over honour, chivalry, and the old-time sense that the world can be well lost. There are many other matters, too, for deep excitement—international, national, literary, artistic, personal. It is the season of sap, of the young life, of green fire. Heart-pulses are throbbing to the full: brains are effervescing under the strong ferment of the wine of life: the spiral flames of the spirit and the red flower of the flesh are fanned and consumed and recreated and fanned anew every hour of every day....
This is going to be a strange year in many ways: a year of spiritual flames moving to and fro, of wild vicissitudes for many souls and for the forces that move through the minds of men. The West will redden in a new light—the ‘west’ of the forlorn peoples who congregate among our isles in Ireland—‘the West’ of the dispeopled mind.
The common Soul is open—one can see certain shadows and lights as though in a mirror.... [The letter ends abruptly.]
Towards the end of April I went to Paris to write upon the two “Salons,” and my husband, still very unwell, went to St. Margaret’s Bay, whence he wrote to me:
Sunday (on the shore by the sea, and in the sunshine). I wonder what you are doing today? I feel very near you in spirit as I always do when I have been reading, hearing, or seeing any beautiful thing—and this forenoon I have done all three, for I am looking upon the beauty of sunlit wind-swept sea, all pale green and white, and upon the deep blue sky above the white cliffs, upon the jackdaws and gulls dense black or snowy against the azure, upon the green life along and up the cliff-face, upon the yellow-green cystus bushes below—and am listening to the sough of the wind, soft and balmy, and the rush and break of the sunlit waves among the pebbly reaches just beyond me—and have been reading Maeterlinck’s two essays, “The Deeper Life” and “The Inner Beauty.”