Taormina,
18th Feb., 1903.
... In fact, letters are now my worst evil to contend against—for, with this foreign life in a place like this, with so many people I know, it is almost impossible to get anything like adequate time for essential work—and still less for the imaginative leisure I need, and dreaming out my work—to say nothing of reading, etc. As you know, too, I have continually to put into each day the life of two persons—each with his or her own interests, preoccupations, work, thoughts, and correspondence. I have really, in a word, quite apart from my own temperament, to live at exactly double the rate in each day of the most active and preoccupied persons. No wonder, then, that I find the continuous correspondence of ‘two persons’ not only a growing weariness, but a terrible strain and indeed perilous handicap on time and energy for work....
A little later William Sharp started for a fortnight’s trip to Greece by way of Calabria—Reggio, Crotona, Taranto, Brindisi to Corfù and Athens, with a view of gathering impressions for the working out of his projected book (by W. S.) to be called Greek Backgrounds.
En route he wrote to me:
23d Jan., 1903.
“Where of all unlikely places do you think this is written from? Neither Corfù nor Samothrace nor Ithaka nor Zante, nor any Greek isle betwixt this and the Peloponnesus, but in Turkey!... i.e., in Turkish Albania, surrounded by turbaned Turks, fezzed Albanians, and picturesque kilted Epeirotes, amid some of the loveliest scenery in the world.
You will have had my several cards en route and last from Târantô. The first of a series of four extraordinary pieces of almost uncanny good fortune befell me en route,—but it would take too long now to write in detail. Meanwhile I may say I met the first of three people to whom I already owe much—and who helped me thro’ every bother at Brindisi. (He is a foreign Consul in Greece.)
(By the way, the engine from Târantô to Brindisi was called the Agamemnon and the steamer to Greece the Poseidon—significant names, eh?)