To Mrs. Henry Pollock.
Madeira: December 18, 1892.
My dear Mentor,—I fear you must have been thinking that I am either very ill or very heartless not to have written ere this. Yet neither is the case. Ill I assuredly am, but not so much as to have prevented me from sending you a letter for the marriage day. The fact is I have been trying to write a sonnet for that occasion ever since I came out here, and cannot. Since my breakdown in June I have entirely lost the power of poetising; I suppose it will come back if my general health should ever return, but still I did think that such an occasion ought to have inspired me. Nothing further than rhymes, however, would come, so the day passed over without my intended contribution to its memorials.
So, dear Mentor, do not think hardly of me. For indeed both you and Marion have been much in my thoughts; and for you especially I know this time must be one of many and varied feelings of the kind that sink deepest into the heart.[102] So not only my old affection, but a new sympathy, is with you—a sympathy in the joy as in the grief of it.
Ethel will have told you what little has to be told about our uneventful life here. As I have said to all my correspondents, it is the island that Tennyson must have had in view when he wrote his 'Lotus-eaters.' The description is so exact, that I need not write anything in the way of description, if you will only read it.
My headaches are growing less intense, although they still keep wonderfully persistent. I cannot foresee what is likely to happen in the end, as no one seems to know exactly what is the matter with me.
The last mail brought me a letter from the Master of my College at Cambridge, telling me that I had been unanimously elected to fill a vacancy in the list of Honorary Fellows. This seems to me very generous, seeing how I have played the prodigal and squandered my living on endowing the enemy.
Please give my very heartiest love and good wishes to the bride. Take also my Christmas greetings for all three of you, coupled with the congratulations that are so meet, and believe me to remain,
Yours ever affectionately,
Geo. J. Romanes.