Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 22d July, 1879.
I feel a perhaps too selfish need to tell you that things have gone ill with me since I last wrote to you. Why do I want to let you know this not agreeable news about myself? Chiefly because I want you to be quite clear that if I do not write to say, "When can you come to me?" it is not from indifference, but from misfortune of another sort. Meanwhile it will do me good to have little items of news from you, when you can find half an hour for the kind deed of writing me a letter. What helps me most is to be told things about others, and your letters are just of the sort I like to have.
I am just now in one of my easier hours, and the demon wind has abated. He seems to enter into my pains with hideous rejoicing.
Letter to James Sully, 7th Aug. 1879.
Thank you for your kind note. There are to be more than as many proofs as you have already had, for which I must crave the valuable aid of your reading.
You will understand all the better how much comfort it is to me to have your help as well as Professor Foster's, when I tell you that for the last eight weeks I have been seriously out of health, and have often been suffering much pain—a state which I imagine you know by experience to heighten all real anxieties, and usually to create unreal.
It cheers me to be told by you that you think the volume interesting. In reading the MS. again and again I had got into a state of tremor about it which deprived me of judgment—just as if it were writing of my own, which I could not trust myself to pronounce upon.
I hope that your own health, and Mrs. Sully's too, will have been benefited by your change from south to north.
Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 11th Aug. 1879.
I think that I am really getting better, and shall have to stay among the minority in this world a little longer than I had expected.